Entries tagged “design”

Another new version of Windows is nearly upon us, as Microsoft will release Windows 7 later this year. Vista was greeted with probably a few too many jeers, which in the tech industry means Windows 7 will probably be greeted with a few too many cheers as compensation. I've used it for a while, and Windows 7 is fine or even great if you like Windows, and will not be fine if you don't. But I found some interesting points in the initial marketing materials that are starting to become visible across the web.

Microsoft's gradual design evolution from Windows 3.1-era "What's design?" to XP-era "We're trying our best!" has graduated with Windows 7 into the first visual design touches that are thoughtful, clever, and perhaps even witty. It starts with the logo and promotional graphics for the new version.

There's been a (likely-unplanned) public reveal of the branding around the new release thanks to a site called Windows Lounge. Staying true to Microsoft's uncomfortably awkward corporate culture, the Windows Lounge site is a standalone one-page website that features a YouTube video and some text instructions, all designed to get Microsoft employees to join a Facebook group where they can talk privately about what's planned for the new Windows release. Yes, they're using Google's video service and a private Facebook group to have a conversation that, being aimed at Microsoft employees only, could take place on their own intranet. But I'm not judging that part!

Instead, look at the clever "7" graphic I've included here, which I cropped from one of the Microsoft promo sites. It's clear and simple, like the "7" name itself — no inscrutable "XP", no overly-broad "Vista", just a version number like software used to have in the olden days. Sure, the overdone lens flare gives it a little bit of that I'm-blinded-by-your-brilliance presumptuousness that made squinting my way through the otherwise-delightful new Star Trek movie a little painful. But overall? It's as good a job as any logo Microsoft's done, and it maybe even suggests a > greater-than sign, subtly indicating that this new product represents an actual improvement over whatever version of Windows you're enduring now.

But the moment of delight in truly pleasing designs comes in the reveal, in the sense of discovery that maybe there's something unexpected or unexpectedly familiar in a graphic. It's that moment of FedEx arrows and hidden Mickeys. Which hit me when looking at the familiar Windows flag logo. What if we take this new 7 logo and overlay it on that old standby Windows flag? We get something like this:

Hey, that's pretty cool! It's not perfect, probably as the result of some hand-tuning of the 7 logo. But to take a familiar icon like the Windows flag and use an element of it in a new way — that's a step forward for Microsoft's visual design efforts in terms of thoughtfulness and care. It even echoes the simple, understandable branding of the new platform itself, which uses a lucky number to try to get back some of that feeling (now almost completely forgotten) of when people used to be curious and excited about new Windows releases. You can imagine exactly how they'd animate this luminescent logo in an advertisement, without even having to see it done — that kind of evocative immediacy has rarely characterized any past Microsoft design efforts.

Of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that the larger corporate culture at Microsoft outside of groups like the Zune team is largely indifferent to design, except where it's actively and aggressively anti-design. Take the official corporate logos page on the company's press site. It features the usual array of Microsoft, Office and Windows logos, along with other smaller products and whatever the hell the Forefront/System Server mesh-typhoon thing is supposed to be. (It's a logo that screams "this product is not for people who like having sex!") But then there's that familiar Windows flag, in large and small versions, laid out however you might want it.

The small version is basically the same as the Windows 7 logo you see above. And the big version, designed for print editors to use in their publications? It looks like this. You can almost hear the folks who were just celebrating their success with the 7 logo sighing and shaking their heads when you click on that link.

There's a principle in game design that's referred to variously as rubber band or elastic artificial intelligence. While descriptions of the concept refer to it as "cheating", and discussions of the technique can sometimes devolve into a litany of frustrated complaints, the idea clearly works. Put simply, an elastic artificial intelligence helps a game adapt to the varying skill levels of players, keeping a game competitive when it might otherwise simply let one player profit from an advantage to the degree that the game would become boring, frustrating, or simply unwinnable for all other players.

In a system like Mario Kart, which uses an elastic intelligence, computer-controlled opponents can vary their skill levels, and human-controlled opponents get advantages that make them better competitors. Adversaries get more adept as your own skill level rises, and in general, gameplay gets more balanced and more satisfying for most players, with the exception of the person in the lead. The leading player is merely kept from running away with the game every single time in a well-balanced game, or in a poorly-designed one, they're punished for being good at the game.

This principle of balancing strengths in a game is pretty important for any system to remain engaging and entertaining for all players; The same idea of balanced gameplay is seen in any kind of multiplayer game. A recent Wired article on board game phenomenon The Settlers of Catan describes its analog implementation of a rubber band AI:

[T]he game is designed to restore balance when someone pulls ahead. If one player gets a clear lead, that person is suddenly the prime candidate for frequent attacks by the Robber, a neat hack that Teuber installed. Roll a seven—the most likely outcome of a two-dice roll, as any craps player knows—and those with more than seven resource cards in their hand lose half their stash, while the person who rolled gets to place a small figure called the Robber on a resource tile, shutting down production of resources for every settlement on that tile. Not surprisingly, players often target the settler with the most points.

In addition to deploying the Robber, players will usually stop trading with any clear leader. In tandem, these two lines of attack can reduce a front-runner's progress to a crawl. Meanwhile, lagging opponents have multiple avenues for catching up.

The interesting thing is that, while a generation has grown up familiar with the idea of elastic balancing, it's still a relatively controversial idea. In games like the Madden football series, where its effect is heavy-handed and obvious, it makes sense that players would balk. But some part of me feels like a lot of the people who complain about these features are the sort of people who object to letting their nephew win at Mario Kart sometimes, just so the game is more fun for everybody.

Interestingly, the "rubber band" analogy for this kind of game balancing is more apt than it might seem at first, when you consider the effect it has on keeping a game fun and lighthearted for a group of players. Rubber bands actually heat up when they're stretched, but cool down when they're restored to their natural state. So an elastic AI really is trying to function as a system that "cools down" a crowd of people who are playing a game.

I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to extrapolate on the political impacts we'll see from a generation growing up seeing elastic artificial intelligence as an important part of keeping harmony in a community of people playing the same game. For the record, I'm a very good Mario Kart player, but I'm still strongly in favor of its use of elastic artificial intelligence.

Please (re-)visit Dan Cook's seminal Nintendo's Genre Innovation Strategy essay from 2005. It's chock-full of his signature revelatory insights, in this case inspired by the excitement and skepticism surrounding the announcement of the controller for the Nintendo Wii (then known as the Revolution).

Among many other inspired moments, Dan offers up, early in the piece, two key points.

• The increasingly hardcore nature of the game industry is causing a contraction of the industry.
• New intuitive controller options will result in innovative game play that will bring new gamers into the fold.

He goes on to describe the evolution of individual genres within the gaming industry, reaching a conclusion that was surprising to me, but that intuitively felt correct upon re-reading:

As the less hardcore players burn out on the game mechanics of their favorite genres, they too are at risk of leaving the game market. The result is a steady erosion of the genre’s population.

What is left is a very peculiar group of highly purified hardcore players. They demand rigorous standardization of game mechanics and have highly refined criteria for judging the quality of their titles. With each generation of titles in the genre, they weed out a few more of the weaker players.

This made me think of the recent innovations around the iPhone and, particularly, the games that have been created for the iPhone app store. Prior to the iPhone's release, high-end mobile phones had, essentially, become a really specific gaming genre, catering to hardcore "players", consisting of tech reviewers and industry analysts whose tastes had evolved as all genres must. "They demand rigorous standardization of game mechanics and have highly refined criteria for judging the quality of their titles. With each generation of titles in the genre, they weed out a few more of the weaker players."

The iPhone was about Nintendo-style innovation, applying the same rules that Nintendo has, and achieving a quite Nintendo-like result of producing a device that is fun, satisfying, and very inexpensive to develop innovative games for. As Dan says about Nintendo's history of innovating in controllers:

One of the easiest ways of creating a new genre is to invent a new series of verbs (or risk mechanics as I called them in my Genre Life Cycle articles). One of the easiest ways of inventing new verbs is to create new input opportunities. Nintendo controls their hardware and they leverage this control to suit their particular business model.

And this is exactly what Nintendo has done historically. The original Dpad, the analog stick, the shoulder buttons, the C-stick, the DS touch pad, link capabilities, the tilt controller, the bongo drums … the list goes on and on.

The touchscreen and tilt sensor in the iPhone are just another in the series of controller innovations, and they've yielded the results that these inventions always do. Only, instead of Mario being the brand that benefits from this new set of verbs, Apple is the brand that benefits.

And all of this confirms my suspicion that the iPod and iPhone are not only designed to be subscription hardware that you repurchase constantly, but that Apple is deliberately creating their devices so that the only way you can level up in this game is by buying a new iPod or iPhone.

It's worth concluding with one of Dan's final points:

Nintendo’s strategy of pursuing innovation benefits the entire industry. It brings in new audiences and creates new genres that provide innovative and exciting experiences. The radical new controller is a great example of this strategy in action.

Surprisingly, this also benefits Microsoft and it benefits Sony. As the years pass, the hard core publishers that serve mature genres will adopt previously innovative genres and commoditize them. Their profits will be less, but they’ll keep a lot of genre addicts very happy. Everybody wins when a game company successfully innovates.

I see both of these strategies as a necessary and expected part of a vibrant and growing industry. Industries need balance and Nintendo is a major force of much needed innovation that prevents industry erosion and decline.

According to Amazon's account of holiday bestsellers, "Nintendo Wii dominated the top sellers in video games and hardware including the Wii console, the Wii remote controller and the Wii nunchuk controller." Worldwide sales of the Wii are nearly equal to sales of the Microsoft XBox 360 and Sony Playstation 3 combined.

In a blog post that I wrote for work today, I had occasion to use an interrobang as part of a title. Hooray! A chance to exercise some pointless effort in pursuit of typographical correctness.

But chasing down that obscure character led me to thinking about an opportunity that still exists for all the type designers out there. Does any commercially-available font out there do a good job of anticipating modern uses of text like smileys and texting shortcuts, and create styled characters or ligatures for them?

We will increasingly see marks like :) and "B4" and "OMG" showing up in print or in styled text online, and that means we should have appropriate typography to represent these words and phrases as our language evolves. This, of course, would also require a Unicode character representation to be added for common smilies, just as one was added for the Euro symbol when that currency was introduced.

The Euro mark also offers us an opportunity to avoid a mistake made when that symbol was introduced. The familiar € mark was unfortunately introduced more as a logo than as a character, meaning designers were initially discouraged from tailoring the presentation of the symbol for appopriate display in the context of a particular font.

With smileys, and especially with new text ligatures from characters that would never have been paired up in the past, we have the chance to see font designers interpret these new parts of the language in the context of type designs that may have existed in some form for centuries. That promises to be fascinating!

Of course, I'm far from an expert about type, let alone about design in general, so maybe someone's already doing good work in this realm, and it's just escaped my notice. Either way, I look forward to finding out when I'll be able to use typographically elegant OMGs and ;)s on my blog.

A Brief Message seems interesting: Essays about design, in 200 words or less. Khoi explains some of the thinking, and the idea of a new design for each update reminds me in a nice way of the late, lamented 0sil8.

I found Nelson Minar's thoughtful look at Larry Craig's arrest to be very moving because of its deeply empathetic perspective. I find one of the things that frustrates me most about the public media sphere is the profound lack of empathy for people. Now, I don't like Craig -- I think he is a hypocrite. But Nelson took the time to think through the perspective of the person being demonized and understand and explain a very logical path to how a person arrives at the worst day of his life.

I find myself wishing more and more that we could teach people the ability to see the world through other perspectives. I think we can detest someone's hypocrisy and regret his awful decisions, and maybe even resent his beliefs, while still being sympathetic for his having been in a situation that left him with no good choices.

This is also what I was thinking about when ruminating on design and mise en place a few weeks ago. There is tremendous opportunity in being able to see through someone else's eyes.

Ryan Freitas, whose culinary wisdom I can personally vouch for, just shared some insights into his idea that designers can learn a lot from the discipline of a well-run kitchen.

The article in Ambidextrous magazine (download the three-page PDF, it should only take a minute) starts with a simple parallel between the two disciplines:

With careers as an interaction designer and a professional cook (sometimes simultaneously), I've noticed striking similarities between the design studio and the kitchen. Like their peers in design, chefs are under constant creative and competitive pressure to execute and innovate. Both professionals service an increasingly savvy customer base in a public landscape where only the tastemakers and trendsetters survive.

Though it's not mentioned in Ryan's article, the most relevant concept to me seemed to be the idea of mise en place, which is basically the discipline that good cooks have of preparing all of their requirements at the ready and properly placed when they begin to prepare a dish. From ingredients to utensils to preparation surfaces to oven temperature, getting everything lined up perfectly means a chef never has to pause to take care of preliminaries while in the midst of creating a meal.

I'm far from a serious cook myself, but I've found that keeping mise in mind when getting ready to cook something forces me to have to actually think through every step of the task I'm about to perform. So it's not merely that all the ingredients are chopped up, it's that knowing what to chop, and how much, makes it imperative that I'm keeping a mental image of the entire process in the front of my mind.

And good design mimics this process by giving you an experience that anticipates mise en place. You find, in the course of using a tool or performing a task, that a designed has thought through the entire process of your task at hand and placed the information and raw materials you need right where you'll need them. Delicious!

Behold, It's (K)not Wood. I hestiate to make such a bold prediction, but it just may be the best blog dedicated to fake wood and woodgrain that you'll see today. I daresay it's the one you've been pining for. It wood knot leave you board.

The International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) winners for 2007 have been posted on BusinessWeek's site. There are all of the usual slideshows and essays that you'd expect, but perhaps the coolest tool is the interactive table of winners from 2000 to 2007, sortable by client, school, or designer.

Hmm, MSNBC gets a brand-new logo, presumably as part of the new "spectrum" campaign they're doing, and yet Brand New has no review of it! The shame!

It looks like SS+K (whose site is shamefully under construction in a very 1998 way), has been leading the effort to brand MSNBC as a "Fuller Spectrum of News". Though it's alluding to the peacock logo MSNBC inherited from its NBC parentage, there's clearly an allusion to having a broader focus of coverage than Fox News, too.

The lame part is the showcase at the "Spectrum" site, though. There's a thing called "Spectrum TV", which I thought might be an interesting visualization of their new initiative, but is basically just a trailer showing off the colors of the rainbow. There's a screensaver, but I'm not really going to download an executable onto my system so that MSNBC can advertise itself. And there's a game "NewsBreaker", which I think is just a Breakout clone with headlines. That's about two decades too late, and you can't even play it yet anyway. They've got a long way to catch up to the addictiveness of Desktop Tower Defense.

And then of course the whole thing is wrapped up in a Flash movie so I can't link to any of these elements anyway. It'd all be forgiveable if the lettering in the new logo wasn't so wonky-looking. Hello, design blogs, help me out here!

A few days ago, I foolishly described a table of my blog archives as my favorite view of my blog. As with all posts that I only spend 30 seconds writing, it got some good responses that really showed how little thought I'd put into the whole thing.

First, Tim Bray offered some good feedback on what he called The Dash View. I should quickly point out that lots of people, including me, have used this kind of display years and years ago. I've also had it on my current sidebar as my archive list for months. So I'm not pretending that it's any kind of innovation, just something neat to look at. Tim improves upon the design by listing his posts by month along with a count of the number of posts.

Jackson Miller followed up with some useful points as well, and Mark Bernstein muses some more about the name (I used to call my daily links "Dash Bored") but his closing point is the most interesting one:

Chronological access is literally geeky: we're exploring it because we can, not because it's useful. It's far more useful to provide good topical access, and still better to link things together. But if dates are what you have, then it's better to represent and use the dates than to treat your archives as fish wrap.

I've found a much better date-based organization of blog info: Ryan's got a year in review post that helps me remember just how eventful 2006 has been for me, too.

Windows Vista's astoundingly long beta period is winding down (they just sent out the "what did you think of the beta?" surveys to testers), which means a whole wave of analyses of the new user interface is about to be unleashed.

Amongst the hand-wringing over the choice of colors and animations, and the inevitable kvetching about the need for new video cards, it's worth pointing out the rise of some interesting personalities from within Microsoft. In fact, the most notable thing to learn from Microsoft's recent enormous leaps in the usability and attractiveness of its flagship products is that there actually are personalities at Microsoft.

Take Tjeerd (pronounced "Cheered", as is noted every time his name is mentioned) Hoek, a design director at Microsoft. There's a brief profile of him on the Microsoft Design site (did you know Microsoft had a design site? I didn't.) Having worked his way through various versions of Office from 95 to XP, Tjeerd moved to Windows and became one of the driving forces behind trying to make Vista not just pleasant, but possibly even enjoyable. I think they've done a fairly good job, just based on some admittedly superficial testing of Vista betas. But you might want to take that with a grain of salt given my effusive praise for Microsoft Office 2007 and my earlier kudos for Jensen Harris, who is roughly Tjeerd's counterpart on the Office team.

Caveats aside, take a look at this 2004 Paul Thurrott interview with Tjeerd and Hillel Cooperman:

Hillel: It's a funny thing. It's very easy to look at a company -- and I'm not saying you're doing this, but I did do this -- and see some of the very obvious spots where we could be less boring, less formulaic, or whatever those things are.

...

Hillel: We make it hard on ourselves because our style is not to push a single personality as the genius behind all of it.

Paul: Are you sure about that? [Laughter]
Hillel: No, when it comes to the UI ... Look, we certainly have a single personality when it comes to the guy that is running the company. But even there, there are a lot of people on stage during keynotes, and it's not just people doing a demo for Bill Gates. I mean, that was my job, but ...

I'm talking about, from the UI perspective, this is a real team effort. The bench that we have around the UI is so exciting, but you're only seeing two of us today. When you come back in April, you have to meet everyone else.

Here's the truth. The reason we've never been great at telling this story is that ultimately, if we have to choose between making it as great a product as possible and getting the story out, we'll always choose the former. We don't really care about the credit. We've only started to care recently because we've realized that it sets the tone for what users expect from the product. So it's not so much that we really care about getting credit, but if we're going to talk about what we're trying to accomplish, the credit goes to a broad group of people.

Another great look at the team's attempts at being more human, not just in the user interfaces they create, but in their interactions with customers outside Microsoft, is in this 2004 Discover article by Steven Johnson.

A growing awareness of the inextricable connection between emotion and cognition sparked Microsoft’s push toward aesthetically pleasing software. For many years their products were the virtual equivalent of the barren cubicle mazes of many modern offices: functional, but devoid of life, of personality. Neglecting aesthetics might have made a kind of cruel sense in an older, assembly-line context, in which work revolved around mindless, repetitive labor. Factory owners didn’t want to inspire creativity among their employees; they wanted to drill it out of them. But the keyboard jockeys of the information age -- precisely the people using Microsoft Windows -- do their best work when they’re rewarded, rather than discouraged, for creativity and mental agility.

I find the parallel between the humanization of Microsoft as a company and Microsoft's software products to be fascinating. Given that Apple is considered (fairly on unfairly) the reference standard for usability and delightful experience, I wonder what impact it will have in the long run that none of the many rank-and-file designers within the company are allowed to speak publicly with their own voices about the work they do. Either way, increasing competition to make software more pleasant can only be a good thing.

I keep returning to the concept that software provides an environment for creativity, and that these tools create a context for the content we create within them. What we publish is shaped by the way we publish it.

The canonical example is Microsoft PowerPoint, which is (often wrongly) accused of crapifying anything that's entered into the slideshow program. But I've been thinking a bit about Adobe Acrobat, especially since very little of the content published in Acrobat's PDF format is actually created with the tool. I'd suspect the overwhelming majority of PDFs are created in Word or a similar tool and then output in the format. But there seem to be conventions that have developed among doucments created for PDF output, even if different tools were used to author them.