DAM Technology

An asserted hypothesis:

The more easily you can talk about a user interface, the more easily you can understand how to manipulate it.

Yeah, I generally agree with that and it’s been a fundamental part to how we’ve approached a lot of our interface works in the galleries here at the museum. I think the amount of time someone is going to devote to whatever experience we create is pretty minimal and that having complex interfaces and interactions quickly chew into that engagement time. So, wherever we can make the interface immediately intuitable or simplify the experience so that are no incorrect actions, the better of we are and the quicker someone can get into an experience.

My general rule of thumb has been to create interactions that you can describe in a sentence to someone and take advantage of things they already know how to do. For example, in one of our video experiences, the Select-a-chat, a visitor manipulates a tangible object to select and watch videos. In this instance, we have a metal ‘X’ that they move on a table of pictures of different topics. My sentence to describe the interaction is simply, ‘X’ marks the spot.

Could we do the same thing with a touchscreen and some buttons on-screen? Sure, but it’s not as interesting nor unique, nor does it take advantage of real world objects that already impart some meaning to the user. And, there isn’t any time spent figuring out how yet another person has defined their button/video interface on yet another touchscreen. Bad design abounds in the interface world and we can be a source of slightly less frustration (and at the same time create something a little magical) than that’s what we’re going to aim for.

Big Picture, Software