| Thursday, January 11, 2007 |
17:07 - Holy duck boot! It's a cat
http://lostgarden.com/2006/12/wii-help-cat-lesson-in-interaction.html
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Via Cabel Sasser, a great analysis of that most puzzling and fascinating user-interface element of the modern age: The Help Cat, by Nintendo.
I can't help but sit and nod at the conclusions it draws. No matter how difficult such concepts would be to fit into traditional software that isn't intended to be "playful", the theories behind it seem to be sound—as we should be able to see intuitively by the fact that it makes people want to get the hints it presents, rather than brushing them away with a bark of annoyance like the "Show Tips at Startup!?!!" dialog in Windows or Office.
As Cabel says, it's great stuff in particular for interface nerds. But it's also a little disheartening, in that it implies that the engineers at Nintendo not only have stumbled upon an insight the rest of us haven't—they probably understand this stuff better than anybody outside (or even inside) Apple, to the point where while we struggle with the concepts in blog posts, they're already engineering whole products around them. It makes me feel like a freshman grinding his way through a nuclear physics text, barely grasping the dumbed-down versions of the theories in it, while outside the window a fission plant chugs away, supplying power through a process that to me might as well be magic.
Or, perhaps more aptly, getting a boot to the head from a Shaolin master.
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Brian Tiemann
