Social Divergence

Twitter and Facebook are essentially very similar social networks these days. The only real thing separating them  is for which social groups they are used for.

So it is no surprise that their Android applications are close to identical in many respects. The desktop widgets are in fact identical, aside from a few aesthetic differences.

For both, each status update or tweet is sectioned off in it's own individual box. The profile pic for the original poster is in a column on the left with their name to the right along with the body of the post and any additional information, such as time it was posted and number of comments of likes (in the case of Facebook), at the bottom.

Now as you are probably already aware of it's very common for things like pictures, videos and URLs to be the main contents of a post, and it is in how they are treated that these respective apps differ.

Twitter treats it almost like you would expect a web page to work - tapping a person's name takes you to their profile, a URL to the respective web page (or application in the case of things like the Youtube app).


It also has a drop-down menu of sorts on the right that allows you to do standard Twitter actions such as @reply or retweet.

Facebook on the other hand, does something slightly differently. Instead of individual elements the whole box is one area that can be tapped on. A single tap takes you to the status update itself where you can comment on it if you want. A long press pops up a menu with a list of options related to the status update. For instance, any URL included in the message is given it's own selectable item in the menu.

This is much better than twitter's method, as the text is so small, my giant fingers often have difficulty tapping on URLs - especially if they're directly underneath the tweeter's username as that is also a link that takes you to their profile.

Unfortunately Facebook breaks it's own rules as any photos shared with the status update must be tapped directly if you want to look at them, and they're not included in the long press menu. So points will be deducted for breaking consistency here.

I think Facebook definitely have the right approach here - touch screens can't be designed expecting a high fidelity input. Large clickable areas should be the order of the day.

Relatively directional

Take a look at the video of Dragon Age on the left. More specifically take a look at the Mini-map in the top right hand corner when the camera pans around a character (this happens most after the 45 second mark).

You'll notice that the highlighted field of view changes to reflect where the camera is pointing, but the map itself stays fixed with up as north.

Now take a look at this video of Grand Theft Auto 4 on the right. You'll notice there is no marker indicating where the camera is currently facing, but instead the map itself rotates so that up is forward.

This difference in UI functionality is probably more down to the fact that Dragon Age was developed primarily as a PC game (as opposed to say, Mass Effect) and as such has quite a few similarities with the real time strategy genre (you'll notice in the video above - if you watch it all the way through - that the player pauses to order his troops around the battlefield).

Usually in an RTS game, the mini-map will display up as north, and overlay a marker with the camera's orientation and position.

In the version of the game for 360, the game has been retrofitted to work on a control pad, and for the most part it works fine, but this change means it's closer again to Mass Effect than your typical RTS, played predominately from the 3rd person perspective of your character.
What this means for the mini-map at least is that you'll look on the map for the exit to the room you're currently occupying, see that it is on your left and then get momentarily stumped by the lack of door in the west wall. You then of course realise that it wasn't left but east.

You'll notice for instance, that any good SatNav will display driving instructions in a manner relative to the driver - before Google Navigation, I was stuck with Google Maps, which is a great program, but as the name would imply it is as useful as giving a driver an A-Z with a route drawn out on it's pages. Driving south for instance means that a turn to the west is actually to the right, which is (generally speaking) the opposite of what you expect, convention placing the west to the left.

So, in summary, relativity is king.

Rock Band 2 vs Guitar Hero 4

For the most part I consider Rock Band to be the superior franchise. This is clearly evidenced by the sheer number of hours my friends and I have logged playing Rock Band over Guitar Hero. I think there are several reasons for this, the most obvious being the hugantic™ amount of tracks available to buy on the Rock Band store (A large proportion of which we have in fact purchased).

But the other reasons are a lot more subtle. Take a look at these two screenshots, on the left, Rock Band, and on the right, Guitar Hero:

In Rock Band, you'll notice at the bottom of each player's respective highway is that player's current score multiplier and the overdrive power bar. This is even true of the singer whose highway is at the top of the screen - you'll notice the score multiplier disc is in line with the target line, which is the place on the screen where each player's eyesight will be focused for the majority of the song.

By comparison, the Guitar Hero score multiplier is displayed up and to the side of each highway, which, whilst not a particularly large distance, is still enough that you're not really looking at the target line any more. The star power metre (the Guitar Hero equivalent to Rock Band's "Overdrive") is well out of the way in the top left corner. Of course, Guitar Hero's star power is combined for all players, which explains why it's as it is, but I think there's an argument for duplicating the information on each of the three highways so that player's don't have to look away from the target line to know how they're doing in that regard.

Rock band also has the "crowd metre" on the left, which shows the players how well they're performing or how close they are to failing a song. All player's are presented on a vertical bar as simple, clear icons which are easy to separate. Guitar Hero has combined this aspect of the HUD with the star power metre. You've got glowing yellow icons for each of the players on 4 separate power bars which has the end result of creating a very murky looking interface item that takes more than a brief moment to see how well you're doing.
I think the fact that each player has their own bar means that, if you think about it, a player has to find their icon amongst the 4, and then look at the bar above (which is 2 steps). Whereas in Rock Band, once a player has found their icon, they know how well they're doing as it's the icon itself that moves, and the bar is very clearly visible in the periphery.
It may sound a bit pedantic, but I think this kind of game bears a lot of similarities to driving a car - you must minimise the amount of time you take your eyes off the road. That's one of the reasons road signs are designed to be as simple (and non-distracting) as possible (the other of course being that if it's a long or complicated message on a sign you'll have driven past it before finishing reading it).

There are a few things though, that Guitar Hero does right, and they're so obvious as well, that I can't imagine why they're not present in Rock Band:

Singers are presented with a choice of scrolling text, where the text is constantly scrolling on screen from the right in a similar fashion to the other instruments, or paged text, meaning the text is static on screen, and the whole line changes at once (to a new "page") when the marker reaches the end. Rock Band only has scrolling text.

The other is a simple countdown from the pause menu. Rock Band simply throws you back into the action, usually meaning you'll miss the first few beats or notes as you get back into it, but Guitar Hero gives you a fighting chance by giving you a 3-2-1 at the same tempo as the song no less!

There is a lot of polish to be found in the little things - of any game - that I think can be what separates the good from the great.

Search

These days it seems that more and more interfaces are emphasising the use of search over more traditional methods of navigating applications.

Microsoft have replaced the Windows start bar with a search field, Apple have a context sensitive system wide search called "Spotlight" in OS X, my android phone even has a dedicated hardware search button.

Google of course are the reigning champions of things search. Take Chrome for instance, It's almost insidious in how it's changed how I browse the web, so used am I to just partially typing an address or search term into it's all knowing all powerful "Omnibox" and expecting it to pick up on exactly what I want, that when I have to resort to using another browser such as Firefox - which I used for years without complaint, I might add - I end up typing searches into the address bar (instead of it's separate search bar) and wondering why it's not working.

This shift in the paradigm of how we use computers is one I wholly support. How many minutes have you wasted searching each of the drop down boxes in a program like Word, looking for a specific feature?

For where games are concerned, I feel it's imperative to integrate a decent search feature into the tool chain, including (but not limited to) things like the world builder and string and asset libraries.

For games themselves, it's a slightly different matter, for big MMOs like World of Warcraft or Eve Online which have huge numbers of craftable items, enemies, locations and of course players, you obviously need a way to sift through it all to find what you're looking for.

For your regular triple A first person shooter, a search function is probably not going to help the game itself, but if you've got more than a dozen preferences in the options menu it could be a benefit. How about a console command search feature for first person shooters from the likes of Valve software and id?

Obviously a text based search is pretty pointless on consoles, which don't really support keyboards as standard. On consoles, simplicity is king, as you have a limited number of controls in which to grant the player access to your world.

For the most part though, Search is becoming more and more predominant in user interfaces and with good reason.