Mint Usability

This time around, though, it’s supposedly complete application platform, the g-speak by Oblong Industries. It’s definately the most impressive video I’ve seen, since the platform seems like complete solution, not just some weird hack, and the hand tracking seems to work flawlessly. The downside being that you need to wear stylish gloves from the future to use it, I guess they could use some consumer style hand tracking.

When the dust settles and all awesomeness is placed aside, I still fail to see how that is actually anything but cool toy (could appear at CNN, though). Compared to display+mouse+keyboard that is just awkward and slow, the traditional combination beating the G-Talk, 10 to 0. 

Check the video from full post.

Continue reading “Yet another Minority Report UI, this time it’s awesome”

The video itself is quite old, circa 2007 (old in internet time and/or in multi-touch time), but I wanted still to post it since it illustrates nicely the way how at the moment multi-touch seems to be more of an evolutionary hit and miss than actually a step forward. The video in question is quite nice project, from couple of students from India, their aim is to create whole new Operating System based on multi-touch. Now, that’s quite a goal, and all the respect for that, but it seems that in the same time it’s also the downfall of the project. At least when looking it from the perspective of usability .

Head on forward for video and more analysis

Continue reading “State of the Union – Multi-touch, Independence Day (the movie) of usability”

Remember the coolness dripping user interface from Minority report? (oh, come on! who doesn’t?) Now the new company called Mgestyk Technologies is poised to take that into consumer reality.

Now, as the you might seen the Johnny Chung Lee Wiimote interpretation, Mgestyk system seems to use the same principle, illuminating the users hands with IR-light. However, they have taken it to new level using something I’d guess is some sorts of blob recoginition, which figures out the orientation of the hands, numbers of fingers etc. This in turn seems to be hooked to something that sends keypress events to the system.

I can see one problem with this type of systems. It’s not analog, like you can see from the driving & the flying games, which is a damn shame. Though this I would presume is could be fixable; just imitate joystic events.

Although I would say that I would be much more interested of applications that would be usable to day-to-day gaminglife. Like, say, driving the car in a game without the actual wheel… it’s nice as a toy but it doesn’t have anything on real-life-psysical-wheel-and-pedals-combo. Sure these kind of applications will find their way to advertising (and to CNN ) and later on to say TV controls but I hardly can see them as the only way of controlling, at least not yet. As an way of enhancing user control on the other hand… In my last article I’ve talked about enhancing natural behaviour and the using it in the world of gaming (posture guided gaming). I would say that “bodygesture based control” work best on the secondary means of control, that overlaps the primary (possibly haptic) means of control, giving the user more precise (and in some cases and natural way of fine tuning things.

Check the video after the break.

Continue reading “Minority Report UI, consumer style”

I’ve been throwing this concept back and forth for about 6 months now, thinking if I should just publish it or try to develop it further before publishing. Well, since I don’t have the proper resources nor the time to develop it further at this point, maybe it’s just easier to publish it. So here we go, natural zooming for digital displays:

You know how you look n picture and there is n detail you want to see, like the subjects face? You squint your eyes and maybe look closer to the picture. How about harnessing this natural habit to user interface? And why hasn’t no-one done that yet?

Here is the basic idea in rough scetch:

Read on.

Continue reading “Enhancing natural behaviour – Natural zooming, anyone?”

A while ago I stumbled upon this article (Smashing magazine) about Mac OS X usability highlights, after reading it for a while I couldn’t take it anymore. It was a classic case of cherrypicking things to make A look better than B, and all this in the name of usability, my favourite issue. So, after a month (started the post then moved to another country, started a school etc. and now, finally, finished it), here we go; Debunking Mac OS X usability highs.

One of the problems with the article – alongside others, is that it gives very limited set of examples for given area and via that extremely filtered results makes the assumption that OS X does the whole thing better. Someone would say that the whole list is just cherrypicked to make the OS X look better than it really is. Like claiming that OS X is more intuitive than the rest of the competition because it is apparently easier to install software in it, which even isn’t the case.

Claim no. 1

“1. Consistency
The whole OS and almost every application looks and feels the same, as if a single team developed the whole thing, thanks to Apple HI Guidelines. Official guidelines for user interface design made it possible for users to actually use most Mac-applications in a very same way, creating a seamless and comfortable experience in the end. Users are able to anticipate how system behaves and what to expect from its applications. In fact, consistency dramatically improves learnability and usability of interacting with the system.”

Like the text says, almost every application. Then and there the very point is shot down and morphed to, “OS X is more consistent than Windows because parts of it’s software are consistent“. And still, I’m not convinced it’s more consistent UI than, say Microsoft Vista, as I have seen no evidence of such as i.e. iTunes changes it’s colours etc. Not to mention that every big HMI project/team project has some sort style guide, as it is one of the key parts of UI design, and I have absolutely no doubts that the Windows UI dev team has one.

Not to mention the writer hasn’t even bothered to look if Microsoft has published any comparable guidelines, whatsoever. He just makes assumptions that only Apple could have such things, and proceeds to make his claims. Quick Google and fourth hit revealed this: MSDN: Windows Vista User Experience Guidelines.

He is right on one thing though; consistency improves learnability and usability.

Continue reading “Top 10 Usability highs of the Mac OS – Debunked”

The spanking new iriver SPINN

I’m not talking about just GUI (Graphical User Interface) but of UI as a whole or HMI even, which involves more than just tapping the screen. Just look at how many times the user has to reposition his hands while using the brand-spanking-new wheel/roll thing. The movement is so limited that with one spin you can scroll only couple of menu items.

Check out the video from followup.

Engadget

Continue reading “Video of new iriver SPINN UI – Complicated and slow”

Youre probably smart enough to figure out what in my opinion is a great way for generating that magic buzz around your open source commitment. Yeap, I claim that it has something to do with user interfaces. (Well, isn’t that news)

Three years ago I happened to stumble upon interesting project called ReactOS; a “free version” of Microsoft Windows – open source (blackboxing Windows components) and able to run Windows applications out of the box. Sounds sweet BUT… There’s always a catch. The thing that struck my eyes was the user interface, not because it just was so sweet, far from it. It struck my eyes because it was far from attractive, which in my eyes, was doing good job of destroying the appeal of the whole software. Hence, I decided I wanted to pitch in.

Now, years later I stumbled upon the same project and I even found mockups I made for the project from my harddrive. This provoked some thougths.

Continue reading “How to generate free buzz for your open source project”