A significant part of my background is in haptic technologies. These are technologies that synthesize physical feedback through a controlling device so that you can feel sensations as you interact with a device. A very basic example is the “rumble” from video game controllers. More complex examples are surgical training tools or high-end flight simulator controls. My doctoral work (warning: this is a zip file of the entire dissertation!) involved incorporating haptic feedback into digital audio editing systems and I spent a couple years working at Immersion on numerous user studies involving haptic feedback. Needless to say, the field is of great interest to me.

But what I’ve been looking forward to is a quality consumer level device. The haptic devices that do really cool stuff still cost thousands of dollars. There have been a number of attempts at consumer level products in gaming (such as the Wingman and iFeel mice from Logitech), but these were not commercially successful. What I’d like is an affordable, easily programmable device that I can play around with and use to experiment with new interactions.

The Novint Falcon looks like it might fit the bill. Novint claims the Falcon will retail at under $100 when it ships and that would be great. I haven’t tried one in person, but the details are intriguing. If it can really produce quality haptic effects and comes with a nice programming API, it would really open the door to incorporating haptic feedback into many different types of applications. I won’t even try to describe things this could lead to, because I’ve found it very difficult to convince people through words that this would be beneficial. You kind of need to feel things to understand the benefits. But I really think it has a lot of potential. For a few years, I was using an iFeel mouse on my own computer and that allowed me to feel various Windows UI widgets like buttons, hyperlinks, menu items, etc. Whenever I used a computer without my iFeel, I felt like some crucial part of the UI was missing. For me, it was that powerful in making my GUI experience more pleasant and unstressed.

So I’m really hoping that the Falcon fulfills Novint’s claims. I’m sure I’ll buy one right away. And if it’s a good product, I’ll bet that some really nice UI advances incorporating haptics will start appearing.

I just went to Disneyland. My wife and I visited some friends in Orange County and we went to the “Happiest Place on Earth” with their two young daughters. That’s quite a claim when it rains all day and the temperature hovers around 50 F and you’re fairly wet. Still, the kids loved it and honestly, we adults had a great time also, in large part because the kids were so excited and happy to be there. Also, it didn’t hurt that lines for rides were at most a 20 minute wait.

But in general, the consensus among adults I know seems to be that the rides at Disneyland simply aren’t very good when judged in terms of them being rides. The rides at many other amusement parks are bigger, faster, more exciting. But there’s some “magic” at Disneyland that makes the whole experience enjoyable and memorable anyway. Certainly, a large part of this is nostalgia and regressing toward childhood memories. But I noticed several things during our visit that helps to explain why the Disneyland user experience is positive, even for jaded adults.

1. Many of the special effects are “just good enough”

As technology progresses and we gain access to faster and more computing power, we have a tendency to want to make things more “realistic”. The assumption is that if the presentation is closer to what we experience in the real world, it will ultimately be a better experience. But I don’t think this is true because working on a computer or using a gadget is not in the real world. And this in turn distracts us from the true goal of trying to create the most fulfilling experience possible rather than the most realistic.

As I went through the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, I noticed that many of the effects were obviously fake and had been designed and implemented many years ago. The fire looked like sheets of plastic bathed in red light. The pirates looked silly chasing each other around a circular track. The cannonballs … heck, there weren’t any cannonballs; just flashes of light followed by a splash of water with sound effects. Despite this, however, I liked the ride because the effects were “just good enough”. The ambiance and environment of the ride as a whole was enough to convey the spirit of traveling through pirate land and in the end, my user experience was a positive one.

This brings me to instances of user interface design that for reasons I don’t understand sacrifice a positive experience for greater realism. One specific example is how many audio editing software interfaces insist on presenting on-screen knobs as control widgets. I see a knob, but I interact with a mouse. This annoys me to no end. Mice are great for linear motion, but pretty horrible for circular gestures. I always have trouble with these knob widgets because I don’t know where to start clicking and I don’t know where to drag to. Plus, the parameters that they manipulate tend to be linear anyway. Sliders would be much better devices for performing these tasks, but apparently, they aren’t “real” enough. For me, that’s a poor tradeoff. I don’t need realism when I work on audio. I want effectiveness.

2. Star Tours wasn’t so great

I used to love Star Tours. When it first appeared, I remember being enthralled with the immersive nature of the attraction. I was astounded by how they could simulate all of the various spaceship motions in an enclosed room. This time, I wasn’t so impressed. But I don’t think this was due to the motion effects. I think it was because of the visuals on the screen. It was quite obvious that the graphic quality of the visual effects was not modern state of the art technology. The ability of graphics technology has improved so dramatically in recent years that our standard of what we expect to see on a screen has increased as well. The Star Tours visuals looked dated and sucked me out of the immersive illusion.

In this case, realism (or what I imagine real space should be like) was important. So the lesson is to make careful judgments about whether or not realism is an important aspect of the user experience and to implement it wisely.

3. Entertainment while you wait

Although the lines were very short this trip, on other visits the lines for rides have been excruciatingly long and boring. But for many of the attractions, once I’m inside the building, the experience begins. Disneyland does a terrific job of entertaining while you wait.

As you wait for Star Tours, you’re treated as an interstellar tourist walking through the spaceship terminal. There are large videos providing galactic news, safety instructions a la plane flights, and robots doing work of some sort or another. As you’re in line for the Indiana Jones ride, you move through a maze of tunnels and caves. You see darkness, rocks, and torches. There is a certain level of suspense and anticipation just walking in line.

I find myself very appreciative of these designs. They greatly enhance the experience of the rides, not only by providing things to do and see while waiting, but also because they increase the immersive nature of the experience. Again, realism comes into play, but there is also the factor of preparing guests for the main event. As user experience practitioners, there is a lot we can learn from this. There are many instances where users are left waiting for something to happen. Sometimes, nothing happens during this period and this is horrible. At a minimum, we are shown a spinning ball or some sort of progress bar. This is much, much better. And in a few situations, we are presented with something useful while we wait, perhaps helpful tips about an application that is being installed or an entertaining animation.

We’d all like it if we never had to wait for things to happen, but that’s not how the world, nor a computer, works. Waiting is part of the experience. But a good experience designer will use these moments to make the waiting painless, or even beneficial, by providing something than enhances the usage process.

I’m hopping on the bandwagon. It’s time to kick start the Furiant weblog. Why am I doing this? Well, at any given time, there are a lot of things going on in my mind. By writing about them, I’m able to formulate these thoughts in a more cogent manner and it helps me understand better the things I’m thinking about. So to a large extent, this blog is for my own benefit. It helps me think and it provides a record of my thoughts over time. I’m looking at it as a sort of professional diary.

At the same time, however, I hope that others will also be interested in what I’m thinking and I hope that others will also learn from my thoughts. In general, the spread of knowledge is a good thing and perhaps others will benefit from things that they read here.

With this as my purpose, I don’t plan on spending too much time carefully crafting what I write in these entries. On occasion, you may find more thoughtful, researched articles appearing on this page, but for the most part, I’ll be writing what I’m thinking as I’m thinking it. Based on my experience of reading other existing blogs, this is how most others bloggers write also. So what is the value of all of these thousands of instances of extemporaneous writing? We are all very familiar with the disturbingly high proportion of low-quality material on the web. Wouldn’t we all be better served if bloggers focused more on quality rather than quantity?

I say no. To me, a web-wide brain dump can be very beneficial. Think of this process in terms of design or any other endeavor where the goal is to create something. One of the first steps is creative brainstorming where any and all ideas begin as legitimate thoughts. When I brainstorm, I don’t want to discount ideas before I can write them down. I rely on future editing and evaluating to determine which ideas deserve further consideration. I want to believe that high-quantity blogging serves the same purpose. Bloggers provide a great amount of thought in a very short span of time. In essence, it’s a web-wide brainstorming session about any conceivable topic.

The problem we face is that there is a lack of evaluation as a next step. There is no systematic process of determining which ideas that emerge from these blogs will prove to be worthwhile down the road. The current evolutionary method relies on blog popularity to reflect quality or search engines (maybe things like Technorati) to pull specific items to the top of search results. The assumption is that quality gains popularity because more and more people learn to trust certain blogging sources. But this takes time and is not necessarily related to the content. In a way it’s like asserting that certain pop music acts are higher quality because they’re more popular. There just isn’t a strong correlation there.

What would be really useful is a system of evaluation that helps determine the quality of blog material regardless of popularity. I have no idea how to do this. I imagine it would make a pretty good doctoral dissertation for somebody. But wouldn’t it be great if we could leverage the web-wide brain dump more efficiently? I know that there are great ideas and choice pieces of information being presented by many bloggers out there. I also know that there are a great many more instances where the content simply won’t make a difference for any purpose.

So let’s blog on. Let’s not deter anybody from contributing to the brain dump. But let’s also hope that some clever soul figures out how to weed through all of this for us because there certainly are gems of wisdom out there and I hope for a better way to benefit from them.