Pixel Thread

Firefox Mobile Concept Video from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

“User experience is the most important aspect of having a compelling mobile product.”

Full details on Aza Raskin’s blog here

So I finally succumbed and bought a Wii. You have to understand it’s not for me, it’s for the family! Well that’s how I justified it anyway.

My five year old boy is a big fan of miniclip (a big flash games site) and rather than him spending time there on his own, mouse clicking away, I thought it would be good to have a more social way of playing games.

I love the fact that playing a game on the Wii tends to mean you’re moving about, stretching, reaching and swinging arms. This is good for a boy I think.

The Wii fit closed the deal. Now the Wii wouldn’t just be for the kids, myself and Mrs could hop on board! And then I discovered that there’s a Wii specific version of iPlayer, so we could have iPlayer in our living room. Want became need.

Ease of use

So far so good. We’re still discovering it really, but one thing that’s particularly struck me is the ease of use and the overall experience of using the console. I’ve never owned a games console before, so it was great using an operating system that wasn’t designed by Microsoft!

Screens are simple and intuitive. Buttons are big and there are few of them. Choices are usually kept down to two or three. This simplicity is the key to the Wii’s success. My boy has quickly got to grips with it.

Hand Controller

The hand controller which works as a pointer on the screen give a satisfying judder when you ‘mouseover’ a button or clickable item. It even has a small speaker which contributes to making the experience as immersive as possible.

Sounds

Much thought has gone into the sounds which are a key component of the Wii experience. For example the Wii fit board gives a little mouse-type squeak when you step on it - cue much five year old hilarity! When browsing the web, zooming in on a page gives a satisfying swoosh, zooming out reverses the sound. Cue much zooming!

iPlayer

Using the Wii for iPlayer is easy once you know how. You have to install a version of Opera browser and navigate to the iPlayer site on the BBC. You can then zoom in to view full screen and hide the browser furniture. Quality isn’t fantastic as it’s using version 7 of Flash for various reasons, but it’s perfectly watchable.

Usability

Despite the amount of thought that’s clearly gone into the Wii, there are a couple of very obvious usability issues which I’d have though user testing would have caught immediately:

• When you’re playing a game and you want to return to the game homepage, the options presented are ‘Continue Playing’ or ‘Reset’. To me, reset means clear all data and start again rather than return to game home.

• In the web browser there’s no obvious way of saving to favourites. We discovered that you have to press the favourites button twice. And there are a few other small issues.

Just like coka-cola

But overall after a weekend of testing with our inlaws and their boy, Wii’re loving it!

An article I’ve written on designing websites to work effectively at 1024×768 screen resolution is published in this month’s .Net magazine and on bbctraining.com (which also includes sample template files to download): Designing sites for 1024×768

The importance of images in product description pages has been well documented.

A high quality pic can turn a browser into a customer. As broadband’s become the norm in the western world, online shops have been getting more adventurous with their use of images.

Combined some well written code, product pages are now giving the user the facility to closely inspect an item before buying. Great from the customer and the shop perspective.

Magneto product page has a nice image zoomer and Habitat’s product page has a very tidy mouseover inspection. Probably soon to become the norm across the web. In contrast, the mouseover action on the category home pages of Habitat leave me reeling! (Fail harder?)

The bigger online stores are lagging a bit behind in this respect. The ebay interface is still pretty clunky, Amazon’s product page is hugely cluttered.

I’ve been watching the development of Magento over the past year or so, and so far it ticks all the right boxes.
But the feature that clinches the deal for me is the one page checkout: instead of taking the user through a sequence of pages until they finally reach order confirmation, Magento does it all in one place, through the use of expandable / collapsible page sections. Neat.

Magento