Introducing technology in everyday living is not as simple as it may seem. Many of us often use computers, mobile phones, and PDAs, devices that are getting more and more powerful and smarter. But what happens to all the other technologically enhanced products the market tries to convince us we need? The reality is that technology is quite often unreliable thus, our devices’ life is pretty short. Understandably, people are scared of changing the kitchen table LEDs and sensors every year or of having to call an engineer for it instead of doing it themselves.

For these reasons, I’m always very sceptical when I hear about a new electronic device that should enter our lives. I am definitely not against technology enhancements, but what I notice, unfortunately, is the lack of meaningful enhancements in the user experience, something that with a good interaction design can easily be achieved.

Size comparison between Chumby and a mug

Chumby is a product that doesn’t intend to replace any particular object already in our homes, although it could eventually replace many of them. It is a Linux-based compact device with touch screen that firstly, thanks to its wi-fi connection, allows you to run client applications off-line or connected to the Internet (from a simple clock alarm to a flicker pool visualizer), and secondly, thanks to its soft container and different sensors, to be controlled through physical interactions.

Cumby with a Flicker pool running

These features are already enough for it to be considered as a very cool gadget, however, I reckon that its strengths are somewhere else. Chumby is in fact “completely hackable” and can count on user generated widgets. So, if you are a developer/hacker, you can easily customize it yourself (also simply changing the crafted holder) or, if you aren’t, you can easily use some interesting widgets developed by someone else.

Some of widgets already available

No doubts hackers will love a device like this, but I’m sure that even normal web surfers will easily appreciate its potentialities and the many customizing possibilities they will have using someone else’s hacks.

Some exterior customizations

Therefore, an important success factor will be the simplicity of customizing hardware and software. Since the creators know it well, despite I couldn’t test it yet, I am pretty confident that for its launch, early this summer, they will provide a user-friendly extendible framework easily accessible by many developers. This will allow the community to grow consistently and find always new and fascinating applications for this smart product. Its relative low-tech components will hopefully help to make it long-lasting thus bringing back some of the trust people have lost in electronic devices.

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.

Last February BBC launched BBC Two on a new broadband website. Broadband because it has been designed to host videos, both on the homepage and also through popups, furthermore, its interface enhances the typography design and pictures instead of long texts.

A screenshot of the homepage when reviewed.

The web designers really pushed the boundaries of the available technology, not only for the complex grid of the page but also for the Flash movie they added as background (rotating clouds)! Definitely many brave decisions in fact, despite the fact that they made many workarounds to make it as more accessible as possible, they chose to use Flash 8 as video player in the homepage (of course we know that the rapport between size and quality isn’t comparable with older versions). For the video popups they initially tried a flash menu that replaced the html one, particularly useful for anti-aliasing text ability. Later they removed this option, probably due to compatibility issues or for issues relating to scrollable list of items.

A particular feature implemented is worth a discussing. I am referring to the fading of the content of the video popup. In fact when a popup is opened to show us a video the interface of the window is hidden according to the mouse position. If the mouse is outside the window, and so presumably the user has no intention on interacting with the window, the interface fades out (get darker).

The popup with the video player.

This feature helps users to focus on the video removing possible distractions. The popup window does not cover the whole screen and leaves the page behind as it was, probably not a perfect solution yet. Of course, from a technology viewpoint this could be a problem due o the presence of two different browser instances, the window behind could be easily another software thus it wouldn’t be worth the effort. An option could probably be to resize the popup size based on user’s screen, however we know how much users don’t like this and that it would be a drama for people with more than a display.

The funny, or sad, thing is that I designed a very similar feature for my blog before I saw BBC Two website (header and sidebar fadeout after not interacting with them for few seconds), but unfortunately my blog was announced a few months later, so well done to them, especially for their courage to implement such a feature and also other tiny high interactive controllers, like the one of the homepage video, in a website with such a broad audience.

The video embedded in the homepage.