Touchless Interface

A senior design group from Northeastern designed a touchless computer interface. You can see a video of it in action here. Using electric fields, the device is able to detect the x, y and z locations of objects over top of it. The user then waves their hand over the device to control the computer. For example, the group designed an application that allows the user to draw on the screen. The x and y coordinate determine the position on the screen and the z coordinate determines the color. The color control is very crude; it only blue-ish to green-ish colors.

Another application the group developed is 3-D object rotation. The control they showed worked pretty much just like a mouse would - move right to rotate counter-clockwise, left to rotate clockwise. It did not allow the user to rotate the object in a particularly intuitive manner. I am not sure if it is just because it was demo app or if it because the device cannot pick up that sort of motion. I suspect its some of both.

Virtual Reality with a Wiimote

Johnny Chung Lee from Carnegie Mellon University has devised a set-up to create a virtual 3-D set-up using nothing more than a television, laptop, Wiimote and sensor bar. His description includes a demonstration starting at 2:30.

Instead of the user holding the Wiimote with the sensor bar attached to the TV, the user wears the sensor bar, and places the Wiimote by the TV. Because wearing a sensor bar looks pretty silly, Mr. Lee bought safety glasses with LED lights and replaced the LED lights with inferred lights. Once everything is hooked up correctly, the user sees a 3-D environment with targets of different sizes and locations. As they move their head around, it truly seems as if the targets are hovering in 3-D space. One problem with the system is that only one person can experience it at a time. Also, the size of the experience is limited to the size of the TV. Overall, the system provides a decent, but cheap, 3-dimensional immersion experience.

Interface or Intelligence

Although many of the points I bring up in this post are applicable to any interface, I will focus on online shopping sites. In particular, I will compare Amazon and Target searching for a decent, cheap electric kettle.

The initial effort should focus primarily on the interface and making it easy to navigate. If the public can't find what they are looking for, they won't use site and then even the best "smarts" won't be any good. However, the one "smart" that should be well developed from the beginning is a good search engine. If I don't know exactly what I want is called (for example, I think an electric kettle is called an electric teapot), the search should offer suggestions.

Once a website is well developed, then there should be a balance between smarts and interface. Again, if the interface is lacking, costumers will be annoyed and avoid the site. One of the current, popular bad designs (in my opinion, at least), is menus that pop-up when your mouse passes over them and mostly fill the screen. They block whatever you were looking at and rarely contain detailed enough groupings to be useful. Unfortunately, Target has chosen to use these on their website.

Another very important interface consideration is what the user needs to click to see the detailed product information. Clicking either the picture or the text will bring up the detailed description on most shopping sites, including Amazon and Target.

Not too surprisingly, both Amazon and Target have similar information - features, reviews, additional product information (size, ASIN #, ...). All of this information is considered standard and customers expect the interface to have them. A designer should make sure the interface contains at least the minimum expected information and in any easy to see interface. Any intelligence (for example, the "Customers Who Viewed This Item Also Viewed" section on Amazon) are extras and should only be worked on once a good interface is developed. However, if two interfaces are roughly equal, the customer will probably choose (at least to figure out what they want) the smarter site.

In summary, the initial design effort should be a good interface with a helpful search. Once that is developed, then most of the development should be in developing intelligence.

Wii Fit - How not to design an interface

My roommate got a Wii Fit last week, so of course we have been playing it. Unfortunately, the interface was not well designed. The main problem is that it takes way too many "A" clicks to start playing a game. For example, to play the ski jump game, you must:

1. Select the ski jump game from the balance menu (this is fine and expected)
2. Choose your level/confirm that you want to play the game (this is also reasonable)
3. Click "A" to clear the message about not jumping on the balance board (I suppose they should have this)
4. Click "A" to say that you are ready (not sure what the purpose of this is)
5. Click "A" again to actually start
6. Put the WiiMote down
7. Play the game, once
8. Pick the WiiMote back up
9. See your score and push "A" to continue (this is reasonable)
10. See your ranking and push "A" to continue (also reasonable)
11. Choose whether you want to replay the game or quit (fine and to be expected)

So, in order to start the game you must click "A" five times! However, only three of the clicks actually do anything useful as far as the user is concerned. For the complete game cycle, you must push "A" eight times! And there is no way to skip any of them. It would have been nice to be able to skip directly from step 8 to step 11 once the game finishes (by pushing a button(s)), especially if you know you did horribly and all you want to to is replay the game.

To be fair, if you choose to replay the game, they start you at step 4. Also, it is really only the balance and aerobic games that are this bad. Nevertheless, Nintendo could have done a much better job designing the interface.