Week 5 - ESPN.com

With all the sports fans on campus, and probably in this class, I felt it would be appropriate to discuss ESPN.com's layout and interfaces for their various tools (GameCast, ESPN 360, etc.). The website itself, given all the information there is to disperse, is fairly well organized. Those sports that are most active at the time have more "presence" (more links to their main pages and major stories, etc.) than sports that are not currently playing. The more popular sports also appear more than those that are not as widely followed. From the main page, it is easy to find your way to any major or minor sport (even "sports" like poker) in case you are looking for a more focused look at a particular sport. Within each "main page", either the main page itself or each specific sports' main page, the layout is intuitive and does not require much searching to find what you are most likely looking for. Obviously, not everything can be laid out on the main page, but those things that are hardest to find are usually the least often used. Additionally, when features or events are on the rise (either in usage or interest), ESPN is usually good about modifying their design or layout to fulfill the change in interest level even going to extents such as making an entirely new section devoted to a large event like the Super Bowl or playoffs or so on.

Their additional features and tools such as GameCast and ESPN360 are not as well made or laid out in comparison to their actual website. GameCast, besides updating sporadically (which has nothing to do with interface design), is actually kind of buggy and are to use. When a drive is in progress, each play is denoted with its own "bar" (showing positive, or negative yardage or no gain) and when hovered over, displays the details of the play. However, most likely for older users, the bars are close together and trying to hover over a specific one can be difficult. Even for a spritely youth such as myself, it can be hard to use and just plain annoying. Additionally, besides the field view, the other sub-windows, such as stats, last play, etc., are not easy to decipher between and poorly designed. ESPN360 is an improvement in design and layout over GameCast, but still can take strides in making things easier to understand and, while not as important, "shinier." The layout is usable, but the look is very basic and at times, maybe too much so. All in all, ESPN does a great job with their website and while I suppose I should be thankful for tools such as GameCast and ESPN360, they could definitely be improved (especially in frequency of updates).

Week 4 - Halo Wars Menu System

Halo Wars was recently released for the Xbox 360 system and was an attempt to spread the RTS (real time strategy) genre to consoles when they normally flourish on PC's. The biggest problem, according to various blogs and comments at video game oriented sites, that most people seemed to have with RTS's on consoles was the lack of a real mouse tool that allowed quick access to menus on different sides of the screen. While there is a joystick one can use, moving around the screen with a mouse is much easier and more natural than a joystick on a controller.

However, Halo Wars tried to change this by creating an easy-to-use/learn menu system for many of the features that take place during combat. From the screenshot about, one can see the menu is a circle that appears in the middle of the screen. As you go around the circle, there are various options you can choose from. Generally, related options stick to one side or another; for example, when training infantry, the infantry unit choices are on the right while the research opportunities to improve these units are on the left. As certain upgrades are obtained and related ones are acquired, these new potential upgrades appear in a similar location to the last, related, upgrade, so there is minimal reading and searching through longer menus.

The actual interactive controls are also intuitive. Once the menu is open, usually accomplished by clicking the proper building or shortcut key on the controller, all one has to do to choose an option is hold the control stick in the direction of the unit or research they want to purchase and then hit A. If there are further options, a new "circle menu" shows up and the same controls are used to choose a second option and show on. While controls and interface do not necessarily coincide, I believe it is important to not only have a good LOOKING interface that makes sense and is easy to learn, but also have one that is easy to use with the most commonly associated tool, in this case, the Xbox 360 controller.

All menus operate in a similar fashion and are very intuitive once you learn one or two of them. Whether you want to build a new building for your base or you want to train units or build tanks or turrets, all menus follow the same pattern and are very easy to learn and use.

Week 3 - Smart or Shiny

In deciding whether time is better spent on smarts or improving the interface, I hate to be the guy that takes the middle ground and is accused of just wanting to please everyone, but I honestly believe you have to balance between the two to have the best finished product. If you focus on one or the other too much, there can be problems on both ends.

If you focus too much of your time on smarts, even though you may have a ton of features and cool things an application is capable of, the user may never get to use these features because they cannot find them or it is difficult to get access to them. Without a good interface for the smarts that are developed, the smarts may go unused and then the time to develop them was wasted. An example of this might be the constant improvements and additions made to Microsoft's Office programs. There are tons and tons of different features available to the user, but they are so deeply buried in menu upon menu upon menu that the user gets fed up with searching for them and they remain obscure. The changes to the menu system in the latest Office helped to an extent, but there are still problems that need to be addressed in that realm.

On the other hand, if you focus too much on the interface, then there are no real useful smarts to include in it. You may have "Rolodex" menus in Vista, but is there really a purpose to that than to make the new OS look cool on commercials? I don't think I've really talked to anyone who's actually used that feature besides the first time they start up Vista. Additionally, turning back to Microsoft Office, we see the help feature suffers from the same problem: both the avatar helpers and the help menu itself. The little dog or Clippy might be cute, but they are not of much help. Perhaps to a user who is completely new to Office, these feature might be slightly welcoming, but once they've learned the basics and want to do more, the help features offer very little. The help menu itself, and the search feature that comes along with it, are so poorly made that, on top of wading through menu after menu, as discussed above, you do not have an easy out via the help system. For the most part, or at least in my experience, you cannot simply search "[insert super secret feature here]" and actually get legitimate results. There are no smarts behind the help system namely the search capabilities.

As you can see, there are negatives to focusing one's time to either smarts or interface alone and the only real way to get the best finished product is to work on both in equal increments. However, if it came down to crunch time, and only one or the other could be completed, I would say it is probably better to focus on smarts. While the menu system in Office may be clunky, if you really want to find and use one of the more obscure features, it may be hard to find, but at least it is there. If Office was just a shiny word processor with a fancy interface that had only bold, underline and italics features, I believe people would grumble more about that than having to search through mountains of menus. Of course, with what we will be doing in this class (surfaces, motion control, etc.), ability to learn HOW to use menus and features also becomes an issue, but that is a discussion for another day.

Week 2 - Facebook

Being someone who's followed Facebook since its near inception, it has undergone a multitude of changes over the years and, as is widely known, grown in popularity every year. Whether these changes are necessary, or liked, is a matter of debate between different people, but changes come and go and, occasionally, user input is taken into account when changes are made especially when certain features become very unpopular. The current setup is likely to change before the year is up, but I would like to discuss the current setup briefly and whether certain features and buttons are all necessary.

Though there are many pages that can be analyzed, the two most popular would have to be the main page and the profile home page. The main page is loaded with content from the latest updates your friends have posted to the latest groups joined to pictures added to requests, be they friend or event. With all this content, one might think things would be too hard to find, but I think the setup is well organized and supports even those users who are new to Facebook and not technologically savvy. The main updates all appear in the middle and central location. Less important or perhaps updates with more substance are on the right and can be followed via links to find out more. There is a short and sweet menu at the top to help people get to the most used pages and there is a complex search feature that continues to evolve. All in all, the main page is well organized despite the tons of information it spits out at you.

The profile page is well organized as well and follows a somewhat similar organization to the main page, but it is split up into sub-sections with similar content. You enter the page with just your feed information, but you can open up the photos tab or the information tab and so on. This fairly intuitive tabbing system, used even in filing cabinets of days gone past, is easily understood even by new users to Facebook or even computers in general. In addition to the main tabs, there are also boxes that appear on the left hand side of the page. These can easily be re-arranged by dragging and dropping them in the order that you find to be the most useful. While this feature may not be readily apparent to newer users, it is also not as important and therefore not a major drawback.

All in all, the Facebook website is well organized considering the amount of data it contains and tries to ft into one page. There are definitely places where minor, or perhaps even major, changes and tweaks can be made, but the current setup gets an A from me.