Tag: ui

The casino experience

From a design/experience perspective, casinos are fascinating places:

1) There are no windows. Gamblers have no idea whether it’s light or dark or sunny or rainy outside.

2) There are no clocks. Dealers are forbidden from wearing watches. Time becomes meaningless.

3) There’s intentionally poor navigation. They are built like mazes meaning it’s usually tough to find a way out.

4) There’s a constant barrage of noises. Slot machines spin, games ding and dong, coins hit metal, there’s the pitter patter of the people running the games, etc. Many of these sounds, like the ringing of the slots, is there to give you a false sense of hope (“If all of those bells are ringing, somebody must be winning!”).

5) Loose slot machines — ones that pay out more often — are placed near highly trafficked areas (e.g. the aisles, change booth, restaurants, etc.) so more people witness winners.

6) There’s constant research on all aspects of the sensory experience: scents, colors, interior design, and the angles of lights (e.g. light that hits people’s foreheads is a no-no because it apparently drains gamblers of energy).

7) The attire (or lack thereof) of everyone who works there contributes to the atmosphere (e.g. dealers in uniforms, pit bosses in suits, servers in skimpy outfits, etc.)

8) Free booze is delivered to gamblers without them having to get up.

9) It’s not a passive experience. Gamblers are made to feel like they influence the process. And when a gambler feels they can affect the outcome — by throwing the die, choosing a roulette number, or deciding when to split at blackjack — a feeling of control develops that keeps them gambling longer.

10) There’s a constant rhythm. Everything happens at regular intervals. Dice are rolled. Cards are dealt. Wheels are spun. Bets are placed. And then it happens again. (Interesting note: Casinos have slowly phased out deck shuffling by installing automatic shufflers. Gamblers used to get a break while dealers reshuffled. Now it’s a constant flow of cards which increases the number of hands per hour — and that means more money for the house.)

11) There are players cards which get frequent gamblers free nights, food, and room upgrades.

12) There’s a palpable energy in the room. Money’s on the line. It’s a big night out. People are paying attention. Everyone’s engaged.

13) The funnel pours one way. There are 1000s of places to hand over money to the casino. Every craps table, blackjack table, roulette wheel, and slot machine will take your cash. Yet there’s only one place to get paid out in bills: the cashier window. And to get there, you’ve got to pass all those other places that want to take your money.

Drag and Drop

However it is implemented, drag-and-drop operations must have a starting point (e.g. where the mouse was clicked, or the start of the selection or element that was selected for the drag), may have any number of intermediate steps (elements that the mouse moves over during a drag, or elements that the user picks as possible drop points as they cycle through possibilities), and must either have an end point (the element above which the mouse button was released, or the element that was finally selected), or be canceled. The end point must be the last element selected as a possible drop point before the drop occurs (so if the operation is not canceled, there must be at least one element in the middle step).

dnd is such a poorly supported concept in general, unfortunately

ui failure

yesterday, we came back from DC, and when we wanted to get on the T at airport station, there was a huge queue. apparently, MBTA had decided to replace the one, 2 second process of “hand over $1.25, get token, insert token, pass barrier” with a 2 minute ordering process with their new ticket machines. the new machines had such a lousy UI that each machine had an MBTA employee assisting with the ordering. instead of a big button to get your damn ticket, you have to wade through a forest of choices (hablas espanol? single ticket, monthly pass, lifelong membership? pay with card, check, sale of daughter? receipt? fries with that? sign up for T frequent commuter miles?) with that familiar touch screen experience (ie, 50% of the time the screen doesn’t recognize your choice). given that just about everyone just wants to get a single ticket and has $1.25 ready, not making that a default accessible with one push is mindless. at least you can recharge your charlie card..

State of X Windows

Jim Gettys, one of the main developers of X Windows, gave a talk about the future of X11 at MIT. The present had some nasty surprises in store, when it took Jim a considerable while to make X11 talk to the projector 😉 It is gratifying to know that even the gurus sometimes fail with the “simplest” tasks.
Rough notes from his talk:
X’s flaws
X’s font architecture fundamentally flawed
Inadequate 2D graphics
Accessibility difficult to implement
No Eye candy
Full integration into 3D environment
Collaborative shared use of X
Cairo brings extremely high quality graphics to free software. Client side fonts are the biggest change in X since 1988.
Try turning on hinting in Freetype (patent problem prevent it from being on by default.)
Lessons learned:
X is but one component of a complete desktop environment
no more flashing: double buffering everywhere
To preserve traditional X flexibility, new Compositioning Manager is introduced. Solved via indirection, copied to visible frame buffer by compositing manager. Apps never draw the screen, compositioning manager applies whatever effects are appropriate and does the screen drawing.
Mouse input needs to be captured and transformed for accessibility. XEvie by Sun does this.
4 new extensions: XFixes, Damage, Composite, XEvie
Eye candy is designed in a way that institutes an upper bound for computation cost. This is a very nice design. (Bound is human perception)
Demo with drop shadows, fade in / out. “A 1000 eye candy flowers will bloom, most will stink, but some will smell nice. Expect a cambrian explosion of eye candy.”
X becomes just another GL application. Croquet project highly recommended.
Jim evoked visions of millions of people sharing 3D spaces with it.
Efforts underway to make X build more easy. Switch to autotools underway. 90% of server round trips can be eliminated. Network compression for synthetic images can do 300x (needed for competition with RDP, Citrix) Session migration needs Xlib support for connection loss. There is a migration prototype done in GTK+ 2.2 One goal is to make input devices network transparent (on the way to X11 entertainment center 🙂
“Network audio solutions are all very lame”
“XFree86 is dead”, most developers moved to X.org. It moved from industry consortium to open membership. X11R6.8 includes X fixes, Evie, Damage, Composite, shipping now. New releases happening much more frequently now.

monad

i’m always amazed about the level of ignorance in the unix community about what’s cooking in microsoft labs. such as the news that text streams may not be the final word for IPC in the shell. check out these demos of monad (courtesy of jon udell)

monad talk monad resources

nooface

i finally found the feed for nooface, a site which purpose is

to support the exchange of ideas about next-generation user interfaces, focusing on approaches that go beyond the WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointing Device) method on which most current user interfaces are based. The goal is to promote out-of-the-box thinking on how user interfaces might evolve to accommodate new classes of users and devices outside of the traditional PC domain.