Meeting Notes --------------- New approach: inviting new gamer via exploding logo, and 36 meaning openness, - Design principles ○ Open, clear, athletic, marai (future) - Wild-mild, organic-architectural - System convergence, parallel paths ○ Dashboard UI ○ Console ID ○ Controller ID - Comparison with earlier xbox Aspect Xbox Xbox 360 UI Screens 45 ? Size of UI MB 250 1.5 Schedule in months 12 20 Internal design team 4 19 External design firms 1 4 - - For earlier Xbox, the UI and functionality was rather simple ○ For entry product, did pretty well, selling 25 million and becoming place 2 - Consumer research ○ Console segmentation ○ Games segmentation ○ Game developers - UI process ○ Had a lot of variables that made us more cluttered ○ Had opportunities to cut through what would otherwise have been a longer process ○ Define § Vision § User scenarios § Priorities § Schedules § Ownership § Responsibilities - First stage: UI theme ○ Took design samples from 5 different designers worldwide ○ Then did user testing to get initial impressions ○ People talked about font without prompting ○ Hardcore gamers preferred the green stuff - Team convergence ○ Microsoft / EXG design ○ Distro ○ Hars experimental design lab (osaka) ○ AKQA ○ JDK ○ Burlington - Brand convergence ○ In terms of LED lighting, controllers - Multiple levels of processes going on at the same time ○ IA, UI, Interaction, Industrial, Feature walkdown - UI Process: Design ○ Information architecture ○ User flow ○ Wireframe diagramming ○ Interaction ○ Visual design - Had a situation where the UI they felt was the correct one was not the one that came out first in the user tests; had to make a hard decision - Guide concept: connecting with community ○ Earlier, UI for that was game specific, and therefore confusing ○ What if there was unified UI? ○ Experimented with transparency and overlay, as two design options - UI Design: prototyping ○ Had had a wireframe diagram by then ○ Homage to 3d: went from basic discussion of "we can make a rectangle here" and "how thick do you want this line to be?" with the engineers to a rich 3D visual UI ○ Selected concertina over loop because it was a flatter UI and gave them more real estate ○ Creating the 3d work for loop was hard, had to be hand coded, therefore after validating that concertina could be a replacement, switched to it - Technological constraints to the design: could not use more than 3% CPU ○ No transparency, limited layers - Flow diagrams for the UI ○ Over 400 individual screens, representing 90% of the UI ○ Having printed screens on paper gave them an advantage - Evaluation ○ Lots of heuristic: constantly ongoing ○ Lab based usability testing ○ 25 usability tests (8-10) participants over last 18 months - Results ○ Always on time, met goals & constraints - Packaging: ○ Package with welcome in 9 languages - Design principles ○ Lead with design, validate with data ○ 2 clicks away, but don't sacrifice clarity for depth Design description ends, expert panel begins - Peter Boatwright, Tepper Business school ○ Author of "design of things to come" ○ Interested in innovation ○ Premise: innovation is work ○ Presents systematic approach to innovation ○ Presents methods for earliest stages - coming up with better ideas to pursue - Would they have done it differently (leaving so much undefined)? ○ a: would say no, but it allowed us to make some interesting decisions ○ b: serendipity was useful because it made us think on our feet. Avoid parallel paths, difficult to keep in alignment with externals, make different teams present to each other so as to give awareness to everyone - Innovation mindset ○ Problem-solution ○ OPPORTUNITY: product - Starting point is the individuals ○ Eg. Of automobile manufacturers, computer manufacturers aren't just making computers anymore - Process: from people to product ○ Which individuals ○ What do those individuals value? ○ Innovation process tools § Analysis of customer value (functional and emotional) - Pragmatic innovation ○ Product must deliver real value (customers were willing to pay) - But the estimated costs are greater than the sale price - The design team was aware of costs - Microsoft ○ Giving design team freedom to design ○ Strategic vs tactical vision - XEO design ○ 4 fun keys - emotion ○ Achieve, experiment, purpose, social ○ 5 impacts: enjoyment, focus, decide, perform, learn - Key 1: fiero ○ Hard fun: balancing player skill with game hardness ○ Xbox 360: rewards mastery, points to spend, leader boards ○ Does anything else in the Xbox 360 enhance the sense of mastery - Key 2: curiosity ○ Curiosity-experiment ○ Balancing the expected and unexpected ○ Xbox: Swoosh sound, novel interaction, background hypnotic swirl ○ Bubble wrap of game design ○ What was the coolest feature that was left out because it was to much fun? § 4 way navigation of the guide. Left out because it was interfering with the game. § Sending another message to the user as a vibrate/tickle - Key 3: people fun ○ Persona preferences § Pro, recreation, family - 19 minutes to set up - Why this controller? ○ 13 buttons? ○ Would use the Nintendo one button controller, if available, but this dialogue is not over - Where is the game I just downloaded? ○ Downloaded on yellow screen but play on green screen. Found in both 'Xbox live' page, but also on 'games' page ○ Users can find it most of the time, so it's ok, but it confuses the definition of marketplace vs live arcade - What is the key strength of the Xbox 360? ○ Visual, information, feature design? ○ c: The UI is not a game, needs to be invisible, visual probably stands out best ○ b: The key strength is a, b & c - What about the keyboard input? ○ Rainbow six gestural system, suggested by game designer not form MS ○ Didn't have enough time; also, this method would appeal to hardcore gamer but not to everyone ○ Had to scale, qwerty was not required because of visual not tactile reference, and key input needed to scale multilingually - Content download ○ Currently not background ○ Will be enabled soon - What were the three hot features you left out of the controller? ○ Led on the controller as game display - Did the console/industrial design contribute to failure in Japanese market ○ Yes, maybe, but when the first Xbox was launched there were no good games for the Japanese markets, ps2 launched 18 months before us - Do you think that the controller is perfect, or needs innovation? ○ Not perfect, absolutely waiting for better controllers. But industry has been designing for standardized controllers because there hasn't been any innovation - How does Xbox compare to pc gaming ○ Different market: different needs, different experience