Comparing Game Systems: Wireless Controllers

Wireless controllers are the best thing to happen to video game consoles since the invention of the Compact Disc (sorry, SNES). No more tripping over wires or having wires that are just too short for you to sit on the couch. Now, you just have to pair the controller with the console, and you’re set.

This process has slight variations across consoles, but one feature I found interesting was how the different wireless controllers indicated which Player they were. Back in the days of wired controllers, if a controller was plugged into Port 1, that controller would be Player 1. Today, it’s assigned based on the order each controller is turned on. The interesting differences between video game consoles (Wii, XBox 360, and the PlayStation 3) come in how the controller displays this information.

On the Wii controller, it’s shocking simple. There are four lights, arranged left to right. The light that is on indicates what Player number you are, and the leftmost light is Player 1.

On the XBox 360 controller, it’s not quite as easy. There are still four lights, but they’re arranged in a circle. Upper left indicates Player 1, and the order goes clockwise around the circle. Still intuitive, but not as immediately so as with the Wii.

The one neat feature is that this mapping is shown on the console itself, so anyone just looking at the console knows how many controllers are connected. This is not so on the Wii or the PlayStation 3.

Finally, the PlayStation 3. At first glance, you don’t see anything.

Then you tilt it up, and you see, similar to the Wii, a row of 4 lights.

Except that, from this angle, Player 1 is the rightmost light and Player 4 is the leftmost. This arrangement only makes sense when you’re looking at the controller from a different perspective.

And who in the world looks at their controller from this angle? Not cool, Sony.

Winner? WII! With the XBox 360 close behind.

XBox 360: New and less-cluttered Dashboard

Only two weeks ago, I posted about an excellent analysis of the XBox 360 Dashboard and a potential redesign. It would have been a great new interface. Microsoft, however, had other ideas.

Yesterday at the E3 conference, Microsoft released details of their Dashboard update this Fall. Frankly, it looks far more modern and far less cluttered. The “blades” have been replaced with a Zune-like menu that should be easier to understand. From a human factors perspective, the biggest feature is: less clutter! The interface is much cleaner with an emphasis on the important UI elements.

A big deal was made on making it easier to find downloadable content. I haven’t seen any screen shots showing an improved search feature, but anything would be better than the current system. Hopefully there will be screenshots to come!

Incredible analysis of a display

The XBox 360 dashboard is the user interface to the XBox operating system. When the game console is booted up, the user is presented with a display that looks like:

The user can navigate to different sections of the display using the XBox 360 controller to switch “Blades” - between, Games, Media, and other functions. It’s a fairly usable design, though it is difficult to make sense of initially (at least, based on my experience).

Over at the blog The Fanboys, there is a fantastic analysis of the 360 dashboard display. The dashboard is broken down into pixels and classified as being used for the user’s content, interactive items (buttons, menus, etc.), ad space, or blank space. The results are startling but also inform a smart redesign that minimizes dead space but does not lead to increased clutter. It’s a really impressive redesign.

The Fanboys: Dreaming of Dashboard 2.0

As someone who is starting to propose a display redesign for a submarine tactical system, this kind of analysis could be incredibly useful to implement. At the very least, it gets the mind thinking in a visual, yet quantitative, manner. Oftentimes, it is easy to be descriptive about changes that need to be done. But when you get sensible and realistic numbers, the case becomes far more convincing.

Animations and the iPhone

Animation in computer interface has been used for as long as the technology has been able to support it. The infamous “Clippy” in Microsoft 1997-2003 is an example of that. However, Clippy was almost universally despised because the animations tended to slow down completing a task. Even worse, when the user is idle (possibly thinking about something), the on-screen character would do a little dance, providing a distraction. No wonder why Clippy was even hated by Microsoft.

Animations can be useful, though, in the right context. On the iPhone/iPod Touch user interface, there are several examples of animations providing information about the state of the interface. This video below (created by me, which explains the awful production values), shows two instances of this. One is zooming and scrolling during navigation in Maps, and the other is scrolling in Safari, the web browser.

These animations naturally fit in the interface; they are not superfluous like Clippy. The zooming and scrolling in maps provides information about location and space. As users progress through the fake turn-by-turn directions, Maps could simply display the next turn. Instead, Maps zooms out from the old location and zooms in to the new location. This provides the user with a sense of where they are in the global sense, but also where they’ve come from in the relative sense (“We’ve driven very far southeast.”) This is useful in giving users a sense of situational awareness about the state of their trip.

The Safari animation is much more subtle – you scroll a page by tapping on the screen with your finger and dragging. When you reach the top or bottom of a page, trying to scroll more gives the user the sense of dragging the whole window, which visually implies to the user that there is no more to see. This is incredibly smart for this interface. In a regular computer interface, scroll bars are used to give the user a sense of position in the document. Scroll bars would not fit well in the iPod Touch interface, however, because many users would feel they had to use this bar to scroll, and the finger is not precise enough to grab a narrow area like that. Instead, the iPod Touch uses the entire screen as an effective scroll bar.

The downside to this is that there is no indication of document position, which is especially crucial at the top or bottom of the document. If the user is at the bottom but thinks there is more to see, the user may try to scroll. If the animation was not present and the interface did nothing, it would look like the scroll command performed by the finger did not register. This would prompt repeated actions by the user, all met by silence from the interface. Instead, this natural “rubbery” action by the interface signals that there is no more document to see. It’s natural, informative, and unobtrusive, which makes for an excellent use of animation.

Map of Science

Tomorrow I leave for my 10-week summer internship in Newport, RI at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center. I’ll be working on Human-Systems Integration, which seems to be a military-specific term for human factors engineering. However, Human-Systems Integration is more than just human factors. It takes into account selection of personnel, training, and both physical and psychological factors of users of systems. It brings together a lot of research and reminds me of how interconnected science is.

A little over a year ago, the Information Esthetics group published what is effectively a map of science, of Relationships among Scientific Paradigms. It’s continually fascinating to see the links between all kinds of different fields. Click the image for a full-size version of the image.

A description from Seed Magazine:

This map was constructed by sorting roughly 800,000 published papers into 776 different scientific paradigms (shown as pale circular nodes) based on how often the papers were cited together by authors of other papers. Links (curved black lines) were made between the paradigms that shared papers, then treated as rubber bands, holding similar paradigms nearer one another when a physical simulation forced every paradigm to repel every other; thus the layout derives directly from the data. Larger paradigms have more papers; node proximity and darker links indicate how many papers are shared between two paradigms. Flowing labels list common words unique to each paradigm, large labels general areas of scientific inquiry.