Sony - www.playstation.com
Sony launched, not sure when, a huge Flash application as website for Playstation. It’s massive, technically very complex and it could seem like the one that products like Flex from Adobe could deliver but the quality and smoothness of the interactions and other particulars made me think it has been developed “simply” in Flash.
A screenshot of the homepage when reviewed.
At the moment I am not such a big Playstation user so I came across the website only because of an interesting lecture about music composing games to Josh Randall (Creative Director at Harmonix Music Systems).
The first thing I noticed was the video player embedded in the interface. When clicked on a thumbnail, a new window is internally created including the thumbnails in it, it looked as a very seamless solution.
The thumbnails before and after the selection of the movie.
Another interesting feature is the rollover on some objects that shows the content only after a couple of seconds. Important thing during these delays is an animation showing clearly the progress of the timer. I saw a similar feature long time ago on handheld devices that showed menus after a long press in the screen, with the due countdown.
A sequence of the rollover interaction (click to enlarge).
For the same aspects this option could not be very comfortable because you have to wait two seconds every time you want to get the information related to the link, but in a complex interface full of elements it allows having not so much visual noise while the user is moving around with the mouse and passes unavoidably over some items he is not interested in. So it gives the possibility to show much more content than without the delay. Maybe half of the time would have been enough to avoid that kind of noise since usually the speed of the mouse is not that slow.
They implemented this delayed interaction in almost all the components around.
List box rollover effect.
There are many other features on the website deserving attention, the homepage in particular shows interesting functionalities so I would definitely suggest a visit to appreciate how much a big website like that can experiment in high interactive interface design.