Design Whimsy
An interesting blog post that showed up on my radar over the last few days was Whimsical Interaction Design, a short text by Dave Cronin at Cooper Design. In this post, Cronin sketches out several great examples of humour, dry wit and mischief across several design disciplines. A variety of examples of work done in this spirit are highlighted including Droog Design, Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers' Bloom and the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button on Google.
Also discussed is the "funky" skin for the Ohmboyz delay VST, a digital audio production plugin developed by OhmForce (pictured above). This alternative interface is a hyper-stylized, sci-fi reconfiguration of the more modest "classic" GUI for the software tool. The post concludes with the following statement:
In some ways, playfulness is at odds with the efficiency, but in other ways, these things are the basis of the experience. The small animations in the iPhone interface make it feel more responsive and enjoyable, even when in actuality they burn CPU cycles and actually delay response. As modernist architects eschewed all ornamentation in the name of mechanical function, only to later find a vernacular of "modern" style, I hope we're on the way to finding a vocabulary of ways to add a little joy to interactive experiences.
I won't contest that the desire to craft joy into interactive experiences is a noble goal, but I would like to add two observations regarding the Ohmboyz example:
- Tattooing the surface of a virtual instrument with robot decals isn't going to make it a better instrument, especially when said stickers are eating up real estate that could be dedicated to additional knobs and sliders.
- If OhmForce were really invested in providing users with a "stylized GUI" they'd allow users to select the images that appear on the VST. We've all seen the kits and laptops of road warrior musicians that are completely covered in decals documenting past gigs, affiliated record labels and preferred hardware. What is so interesting about this pockmarked graphic-heavy gear is the manner in which these signs and symbols have accumulated. What could be more inauthentic than an instrument that arrives from the factory with a prescribed set of images permanently set in place?
I'm not humourless, but when it comes to this kind of play in design I am pretty finicky about where fun stops and bad design starts. In regards to the example above, I've worked with OhmForce plugins and know them to be powerful and unique, so I suppose they can get away with a little interface noodling since they have got the goods to back it up. In general, I agree with the tone of Cronin's piece and wanted to use his perspective on interaction design to point out a few other examples of effective, transformational and disastrous applications of whimsy in design.
Pictured above is an annotated drawing of Pleasurecraft, a recent project by Marisa Jahn and Steve Shada. This well accessorized vehicle is a "kit for any klutz who wishes to woo a potential lover". The vessel combines comfort, gesture, landscape and ritual into a playful meditation on the many clichés of seduction. Jahn and Shada have not only produced a working prototype of their lovecraft but also penned a detailed "operators manuel" - please note the cute "score" of the Pleasurecraft Serenade. You can view full documentation of Pleasurecraft here. [via architectradure]
An example of what might be described as "transformational" design whimsy is at play in twitterMotion, a type focused viewer for examining recent activity for a twitter account. This application was obviously not developed as a full UI for twitter, but instead takes the content of the popular web service and turns it into the basis of a type-driven, animated adventure. It is fun, dizzying and completely alien compared to the scores of identical twitter applications out there. Since there is no input a user can only sit back and watch the content fly by reverse chronologically. TwitterMotion was designed by Geoff Hinchcliffe as part of his PhD research on interface design.
Ok, we've seen the good and the quirky - now for the ugly. 3D Mailbox is a baffling 3D interface for email management. The original iteration of this application can only be described as a "Beach Blanket Bingo in Second Life meets a sexist Microsoft Outlook". The PR for the project reads as follows:
3D Mailbox turns your emails into people: In the first level, Miami Beach, beautiful models represent good email, and goofy Sumo guys represent spam. Chill with your email poolside and in private cabanas, and feed your spam to the sharks! The beautiful locales and Brazilian background music make you feel like you're on vacation any time of the day.
3D Mailbox was lambasted as the "worst. app. ever." on TechCrunch in July 2007 and has since gone on to release air traffic control and zombie themed email interfaces. In watching the hilarious trailer for the first "level" I can't help but wonder what the designers were thinking. I'm not even going to say anything beyond that, just watch the trailer and be wary of too much whimsy.
Have any great or atrocious examples of whimsy in design you'd like to share? Please leave a comment! Thanks to Peter Kirn at Create Digital Music for pointing out Dave Cronin's post which inspired this rambling.
master of whimsy
yugop.com - the master of interface play/whimsy
His recent commercial works for Japanese audiences suggest that functional expectations of the interface are culturally specific rather than universal absolutes. (or maybe just that Japanese audiences are more adventurous?)
Thanks for the mention of twitterMotion. It is just one in a series of works (in-progress) investigating some of the concepts you are discussing here.
In the loop
Geoff, please keep me in the loop about your research. :)
OhmBoys
Greg, you know, I'm not sure whether I actually agree with myself about OhmBoys. I actually personally use the non-funky version of the interface. But I do appreciate the fact that they're attempting to create a certain atmosphere so that computer-based music doesn't feel like checking email or using Excel.
But I also agree with you that this is pretty superficial, and wouldn't it be cool if the interactions felt creative rather than the interface just looking that way.
Nice post.
Fence sitting
Re: Email vs. Excel. Well put! I did like that comment about Lee Scratch Perry vs. Bill Gates.. I guess that takes us into the world of mood design and atmospherics right? I guess what is tricky with the OhmForce stuff is that it is really good, I can't count the number of VSTs that I've *known* were going to be tacky/bad/uninteresting based off ugly UI.. Clearly this is a question for the ages. :)
General design consideration about OhmBoyz
Hi there, I am the OhmBoyz Funky Skin designer (and A.D. for all OhmForce imagery). Real pleasure to see that work discussed ; pro feedback is pretty rare for such niche products!
I think Dave Cronin's quote nails it well: it's rather a matter between where you put the sliders between what I'd call your main message (in Ohmboy's case, playfullness, but it can be something else for other product, especilly the one that aren't creative tools) and in-use efficiency. On the top of that there's also the com angle. When you sell software, you don't really have an opportunity to associate the product with one way to show it like for other products, as nearly every site / paper review will just show it via its screenshot. So the design isn't only tartgeted as "in use" situation, but also nearly as an ad. Which move the sliders a bit more toward "message". But still, good in-use look and feel isn't an option either!
It's a basic design issue that exist more or less in every product rather defined by its usage than its decorative value. I try always to consider it via a quote frome a famous game designer, John Carmack, that says to pay attention to the 3 first minutes, then 3 first hours, then 3 first weeks in the experience of the user. You can just ad 3 first sec at the beginning and you get it : there will be no user in the next step if (s)he's not convinced by the current one. No need to think about good usability if you don't do what's required to get people trying your demo, no need to think about smart long-run workflow features if people cry in pain in the first three hours, etc.
Ohmboyz's skin, wich was my very first work, was already a try to get the com vs use slider right as well as something that will both drag in people to the demo and kept them happy on the middle and long run. Except I am not sure there's a right place for this slider : either you make what's needed to get noticed and you're pissing of some user, either you're perfectly neutral and you don't get noticed (or discussed in blog 8 years after you released your product ;-) That's why we quickly completed our offers with a classic skin. This way we had both the com and the usability. More people would use the classic one, but amongst them, some (how much ? don't know!) would not have heard about the product without the funky one.
Now of course I am not saying the funky one wasn't aiming at all at usability. There was a lot of thinking about it actually! We introduced parameters selection, with contextual sub parameters display to the plugin world and this allowed us to make way more indepth plugins with actually less buttons and easier learning curve than most of the competition. We payed attention to have nearly every parameter impacting the sound, to half their transparency when they wouldn't, to maintain a strong visual hierarchy between parameters that would guide the user's experimentations, to display the very basics right on the skin, etc. Some of those things are pretty common now but certainly weren't back in 2000. Some of those are still quite uncommon actually :)
Now I am not saying that the funky skin was perfect usability wise. Apart from the inevitable cons you've mentionned (Robots are actually not really helping you to understand the plug), the skin was too big, and I regret my idea at the time to use icon without legend for lots of parameters. Icons were a stupid idea for something that needs learning like a plugin !
But I don't regret for instance what you call a waste of space for other knobs and sliders. First because it doesn't work this way design wise : the number of knobs and sliders is known before the design starts. So you just choose how much space you need for that. If you keep in mind the idea that your screen is both your design and the ad for your product you surely see why it makes sense to invest some of the space "just" for communication.
On the top of that, a robot doesn't help, yes, but at least that's space that is relatively friendly to the beginner because the robot requires no brain effort/learning from him while a knob does. I consider the "wall of knobs" designs to be a regular mistake in a lot of plugins GUI. Don't underestimate the empty space ! It's way less expensive in software than in hardware if you do the work right. Don't aim at filling the space, aim at presenting well your parameters. That's one of my moto...
Your idea about skin customisation is of course very relevant. We would all have liked something like this (actually writing the name on the owner on the GUI was about the same kind of considerations) but technically it was actually pretty complicated. Audio software are hugely complicated beasts that requires enormous coding efforts and the market is really tiny so there's no way that you spend precious ressources on that. OTOH I think your comparison with laptop isn't right because you can actually put a sticker on a laptop. You can't on a plugin (unless you stick it on your laptop's screen, of course :P ). That's why it's pretty common to do something a bit tasty for a plug. That, and the fact that you don't have manufacturing to consider for even the tinyiest idea you may have ! M-Tron coffe stain, for instance, was pretty popular... Now of course it works better with "fun" plugs thant with say a production suite from Waves...
To me OhmBoyz is fun like a first work but it's packed with things I'll do differently now. I think you've got a better application of in depth design's consideration for the unique Ohmicide:Melohman GUI we've made with Raphael Dingé (respectively Red and Fuschia forces according to official Ohm terminology) :
ohmforce.com/ViewProduct.do?p=Ohmicide
(truncated URL because of spam filter...)
Cheers
Greg
PS : also posted here
cooper.com/journal/2008/10/whimsy.html