Week 12 - X-Box 360 Menu

A popular gift this holiday season will no doubt be the X-box 360, so, in the spirit of Christmas, let's breakdown the X-Box 360 main menu interface. There are two main menus in the 360's interface, the main interface itself as well as the mini-menu that shows up when you hit the "XBOX" button in the middle of the controller. The main menu is split up between the different main areas: Spotlight, My Xbox, Game Marketplace, Video Marketplace, Music Marketplace, My Friends, Inside Xbox, My Community, and Welcome. The marketplaces are split up into easy to understand categories and people understand where they should go for certain media resources. The Community page and My Friends tab are for interacting with other people, Spotlight highlights new games or features to download, and My Xbox is your current game, settings, achievements and other statistics. All these are easy to understand groupings.

The sub-menu is organized as well, but is much less graphical appealing and has a few less categories. It has most of the same information, but is accessed in a different manner. At times, it is more useful than the main menu because there aren't all those pretty graphics that can sometimes get in the way, but at the same time, some things are more easily understood when you can see a picture and that is what the main menu provides. All in all, it could be said to come down to a debate between functionality and "shininess", but in the end, I think having both menus is the best way to go.

Week 11 - Response to "My Thoughts on the Droid"

The following is a link to the post I am responding to:

http://interfaceintrospection.wordpress.com/2009/11/09/my-thoughts-on-the-droid/

After reading this entry, I am increasingly finding the Droid to be something I might invest in. Although I love technology and think there are a lot of cool gadgets out there, I actually do not spend a ton of money on such things. Sure, smart phones are cool. I love the idea of being able to view "text messages" in a format more like instant messages, and checking football scores on a more manageable and readable screen and so on, but these devices are also expensive. The initial cost of the device isn't the worst of it. It's the price added to your monthly bill that scares me. In addition, the iPhone was the only one that truly caught my eye, but is not currently available on my phone service. Blackberry's are not bad, but they are not exactly the kind of device I want.

However, since I actually use my basic flip phone to keep track of project due dates, shows I like to watch as well as a plethora of other events and activities that take place at random times and have begun to use text messaging a lot more, I am strongly leaning toward making the investment. It would be much nicer to have an actual keyboard to key in events especially when they have long names and odd places that don't always fit in the space a small flip phone's calendar application allows. In addition, I often find myself wanting to check certain stats or information and don't have a good way of doing so. There are other reasons too, but I won't bore my readers with my monotonous daily routine reasons for wanting the Droid. All in all, I think the investment might actually be worth what I get out of it and with the good things I am hearing from the Droid (in addition to the cool name), it sounds like something that would be worth it.

Week 10 - New Grooveshark Layout

Last week, I talked about the old Grooveshark layout. In case you didn't read last week's entry, Grooveshark is a music service that allows you to choose the music you listen to, unlike Pandora, but does not have videos, unlike YouTube. Though the service was great, its features were difficult to discover and the layout less than ideal. Many of the greatest features were hidden in layers of menus and the layout seemed a bit clunky and hard to understand at times. The new Grooveshark layout changes this and makes the service even better than before. Best yet, it's still free.

For starters, the new layout is much prettier than the last. Not that looks are everything, but the dull blue and gray color scheme has been abandoned for a much more fresh and lively blue and yellow color scheme. However, this is only the default. Grooveshark now gives you the option of changing skins. If you are just a free user, the options are limited, but not bad. As a member, the options are even greater and continue to be added to.

Besides just looks, the layout is also much improved. Before, a majority of the options for a user could only be accessed after clicking down through about 5 or so menus. The new layout features a sidebar where you have quick access to many of the options you want off the bat when you log in. You can click "Favorites" and view the music you have "Favorite'd." If there are certain users who's music you like and whom you follow, you just click "People" in this menu. You also have quick and easy access to the playlists you have created as well as playlists featuring popular or recent music so you don't have to go hunting for it yourself.

The music queue area has also been given a makeover. Before, half of the screen was taken up by the music button options such as Play, Pause and so on. There was no way to navigate to a specific place in a song either. Your current queue normally only showed about four the songs you currently had added and required a ton of scrolling. The new layout adds a navigation bar and moves some information into a pop-up box that shows when you hover over the navigation bar. It is in this pop-up box where you have the option to share something on one of the many social networks, download the song or Favorite it. Below the navigation bar is the main queue which now can be viewed in many sizes and layouts each of which take up varying amounts of room and show different amounts of information. The ability to save or update a playlist are now obvious as well.

Finally, the main menu where you navigate through menus and so on has been simplified. The overall design is now centered around tabs as opposed to layers making things much more intuitive especially with the popularity of tabs in browsers: something that even new technology users have had some contact with. The options of "Favorite-ing" a song or playlist or album are all there in the menu and do not require extra clicking or navigating mines of menus. All in all, the entire layout of Grooveshark has received a major makeover and all for the better. Old, hard to find features were redone, menus were shuffled around and redesigned and the entire service now is a major player in the war for users who don't want to actually buy things and would prefer to just listen for free.

Week 9 - Old Grooveshark Layout

This week I will be discussing the original Grooveshark layout and then, next week, I will compare and contrast it to the improvements and changes they made: some for better, some worse. For those who are unaware of Grooveshark, it is essentially an online music player similar to a blend between YouTube and Pandora. Like Pandora, it plays only music and not video and therefore taxes your computer less; however, like YouTube, you can choose what you want to play and make playlists to fit what you like.

The original Grooveshark layout was somewhat unorthodox, but not unwieldy. The main screen was straightforward and contained simply a search bar to find music, albums, playlists and so on. In addition to the search bar, there were also smaller menu choices above that allowed you to view playlists you had made or songs you had "favorited." Navigation within Grooveshark was in a sort of "layered" manner. By this, I mean that as you opened new menu after new menu, the latest one would be layered over the other although the last one would be slightly viewable, so it could be returned to when clicked.

So, for example, if you searched Viva La Vida, search results grouped by song, album, etc. would show up. You might click album because you are looking for the whole CD and that layer would show up. Then maybe you click the album submitted by user ILoveColdplay and this layer would show up with the songs. Then, maybe you click a song to see its information and the song information layer shows up. You read what you want to, find it isn't even the right song, so you click the album results layer and the previous two layers above it disappear. You continue to do this until you find what you want and then add the album or a few songs to your active queue (the songs you are playing during the current session.

This layout is somewhat useful because you can go back to whatever layer you are interested in, but, much of the time, when I was using Grooveshark, I found that I barely ever went back more than one layer and there were tons of layers below the one I was looking at that cluttered the screen and were probably confusing to users who were less familiar with such services or technology in general.

In addition to the navigation of menus, there was also, as mentioned above, the ability to add songs to a current queue as well as to favorite songs. "Favoriting" songs is straight forward and easy as is adding songs to the queue, but it actually took me some time to figure out that you can actually save a queue as a playlist under your username (if you make one which you do not have to do). The options to complete such an action were somewhat hidden which was unfortunate. Additionally, the last thing I learned was that you could actually favorite other peoples' playlists or albums. This is extremely useful, so you don't create your own playlists from other peoples and then have those show up as a duplicate, but the feature is buried under about five layers an then not emphasized.

All in all, Grooveshark is a GREAT service because it allows you to play tons of music and you can choose it all yourself. You can create and save playlists or just save other peoples' playlists to listen to later. Unfortunately, many of the great features of Grooveshark are hard to discover especially for people who are not used to using such interfaces. Next week, I will discuss the improvements the makers of Grooveshark made to the interface and how it makes it much more accessible to all types of users.

Week 8 - Exam Make-up Points

For my blog entry this week, I will be writing about the difference between event-based and control-based triggers in order to earn a few points back on my exam grade.

Property-based triggers are those events that are triggered when certain properties change in an application. This, as I learned on the test, is NOT binding, but it has a similar idea to binding in that certain properties are tied to/bound to other properties whereas in binding, the contents of an object are bound to data in a list or something similar. With property-based triggers, when a certain property of one object changes, it affects/changes other properties.

Property-based triggers can be "embedded"/nested is various blocks of XAML. The following two examples use a ControlTemplate as well as a Style block.

In the above example, when the "HasDropShadow" is true, then the border of the same control has its CornerRadius property set to 4 and its SnapsToDevicePixels set to true.

In this second example, when the object has a mouse over it (IsMouseOver property), it is rotated 10 degrees and the foreground color becomes black. As you can see, these property-based triggers act like their name suggests: they are triggers that are based on changes in one property value that affects the value of other properties.

Event-based triggers are slightly different although they look a little bit similar on the XAML side. The biggest difference in event-based triggers is that they use C# code in addition to the XAML to enact the changes and can do a lot more than just adjust properties in XAML and the like.

public void OnCloseBtn(object o, RoutedEventArgs e)

{

Close();

}

In this example, you can see that the difference here is that, although the XAML still uses a "property" to trigger the event, the event is not necessarily property-based in that the properties of an object are those that define it. With event-based triggers, the Click "property" is used to trigger a change, but the Click property is basically an event hence the name event-based trigger.

In the example, when the button called closeButton is clicked, it calls the function OnCloseBtn which is located in the C# code (and displayed below the XAML in the above examle). When the OnCloseBtn is called, it closes the program. This is a very basic example, but the OnCloseBtn function could have much more complicated functionality and could use information sent via the obeject o and RoutedEventArgs e variables in the function definition.

As one can see, property-based and event-based triggers both get started in the XAML, but the biggest difference is that the event-based triggers are actually carried out in C# functions whereas property-based triggers are carried out in the XAML itself and usually are not as complex or powerful.

Week 7 - Breaking Down "Smarts" and Autocomplete

In designing an interface, I believe there are three different categories that need to be considered: basic functionality, special/additional features and overall look. In a past blog, I stated that "smarts" were more important than "shininess". Smarts in that blog encompassed both basic functionality AND special features, but here I plan to discuss the difference between the two categories within smarts. This is not to say that the overall look of an interface does not deserve its own discussion, but that will be one for another day. So, in discussing the two categories of smarts, we come again to the question of which is more important: basic functionality or special features. In this comparison, as opposed to the smarts vs. shininess debate, the answer seems a little more clear to me. If your interface lacks basic functionality, then it really serves no purpose. If your interface is designed to do one thing, but cannot complete the main task, then it serves no purpose. It may have bells and whistles and so on, but, in the end, if it cannot do what it is marketed to do, no one is going to want to use it and, if you're running a company that needs the business, obviously, you're going to suffer.

However, if you are able to implement basic functionality, I believe special features are the next step in implementation of a design for your interface. As I stated before, smarts are more important than shininess and that includes both categories of smarts. Special features are what distinguish your product from the competition. Sure, there are a ton of search engines out there, but it seems that the most success, beyond having accurate searches, are those that have additional features that allow you to narrow down your search or search among images and so on. What inspired me to write about this topic in the first place was the auto-complete feature. It may seem like a fairly trivial feature in the long run, but I've always found it to be very useful especially when I'm searching for something where I might only know one detail. With auto-complete, I can see, almost instantly, what other searches have been done with my search term in them and can decide if any are appropriate for what I am trying to find. This is especially help on sites like YouTube where I might know the first or last name of a singer or band, or maybe just one word in the main title of a song. With auto-complete, once I type that one word, there's almost always an option that pop-ups that rings a bell in my head and directs me to what I'm looking for.

Features like auto-complete are what make website interfaces more competitive. Without the bells and whistles, even if your product has great basic functionality, people are probably going to be turned off by the simple design and lack of further options. The next step would be to make things look pretty, but, as Google has shown us, you don't always need a "shiny" website to be popular. Their basic design is almost welcoming in that you are not bombarded with sidebars and advertisements and pop-ups and who knows what else. However, "look" is a discussion for another day. For now, in summary, while basic functionality is important to implement at first, it is important to develop, and probably continue to develop, special features, or bells and whistles that make your design and interface more appealing and useful than the competitions'.

Week 6 - "Digital" Menus

For this week's blog entry, I won't be talking about something in particular, but rather an idea I came across recently. Being a Senior, I've been receiving a ton of emails from companies letting me know about information sessions, positions and so on. One of those emails was from a group called Clarity Consulting and, while I'm not really sure what I would be doing there if I actually applied for a job, they did have some neat interface work in one of their videos. One of the most interesting things that caught my eye were the "digital" menus they made. By digital, I mean menus that are on a computer screen and allow you to choose food that way as opposed to in person. While some people have probably thought of this idea before, I suppose I was so used to doing it in person that the thought had never really crossed my mind, but it does make sense.

There are many reasons a digital menu is a good idea. For one, I know there are certain things I forget to say or ask about and, if I had to step through a digital menu, I would run across each option page and be reminded of what I actually want (everyone gets the "ordering jitters" every now and again where they just kind of blank on what they are ordering, right?). Another reason, and a more practical one, would be the ability to see a more full version of what you are getting. For those with poor eyesight, the closer menu would be a welcomed relief and for those who need to see what they are ordering before they actually do (does anyone really know the different between all those different Italian noodles?), it would also be helpful because each option could include a "close-up" or enlarged image of the product. A third reason might be to eliminate awkward interactions with cashiers. I'm not saying cashiers are bad at their job or that I want to run people out of a job, but there are times I'd just rather punch a view buttons, get an order number and grab my food. Now, something some might consider to be a problem would be payment, but they have self-checkouts at grocery stores and the payment would essentially run the same way.

Besides the reason for such an idea to be implemented in full force, there also has to be some discussion on how such an idea would need to be implemented. Fr starters, the main screen might have the different categories of food, for example, the meals, side orders, drinks and desserts. Once you enter a category, let's say meals, you would then have a familiar layout to the menu you normally see above and behind the counter except that when you select a meal it would show you an enlarged image of what you are ordering as well as move you through further ordering steps. For an example, let's say you go to McDonald's. One might choose to look at the meals and then choose the cheeseburger. For there, the next screen might be what you actually want on the cheeseburger where the standard options are already chosen, but can bee deselected if desired. From there, you might choose between the different fry options (if there are different options) and then what kind of drink. After that, you would be able to choose what size meal you want and then would be returned to the main screen with your recent choice added to a list (probably on the right hand side of the screen) that lists what you have ordered. Once you have fund and added everything you want, you would "check out", receive a number and then pick up your food when ready.

All in all, such an addition to restaurants would serve a definite purpose. On a more important level, while there are those who might argue such a system would cause people to lose jobs that are important in that they can be offered to almost anyone from any background, I don't think these machines would eliminate the need for some personal interaction in the places that use these. Furthermore, if a cost effective means could be employed in the future, it would be great to see these menus at sit-down restaurants as well because there are so many more in-depth options at these places and, personally, I want to see a picture of everything being offered and with paper menus that isn't a realistic possibility in most situations. Additionally, the waitress would not have to keep "pestering" a table of slow decision makers when they could choose at their own pace via the menu.