User Interface @ MindSay

About a year ago, my wife spent a metric crapload of money rebuilding our master bathroom. Not just adding curtains, or putting a cute little cover on the toilet. No, she was tearing down walls and rebuilding fixtures. When she was done, it looked like something you'd expect to see in the executive suite at one of the Vegas Casinos. Opulent and classy.

Being an engineer, my wife’s changes were not limited to the look of the place. She made all kinds of usability changes, like a lazy susan under the sink, or the magic water heater that doesn't store water, but rather harnesses the rays of Earth's Yellow Sun to heat water as it moves through the tubes. One of my favorite innovations was the shower temperature gauge.

In a standard shower, you have one knob for Hot water, and another knob for Cold. In ours, however, we have one knob for Temperature, and the other for water pressure. We just leave it at 85 all the time, so we can just switch on the shower anytime we want without testing it. When we first got this innovation, I thought it was the coolest thing. A few months later, I forgot it was even there.

When visiting a friend recently, I had to use their shower, and I noticed how incredibly difficult it was to use. I had to turn on hot and cold, and then wait with my hand under the faucet for the hot water to really start moving. Finally, once I was certain that the Hot water was working, I was able to set the temperature.

It got me thinking about User Interface. In a game, the UI is basically everything that is not part of the actual game. All the menus, buttons, checkboxes, keyboard mapping. It’s all user interface. Usually, people just ignore the interface, pushing past it to get to the actual game; and that is how it should be. I started thinking that the best user interface is never even noticed. For instance, the only time you think about menus is when they don’t work, or they are unclear.

When I first started working for Microprose, I was put on UI, building buttons, menus, keyboard and joystick interaction. I was very proud of the fact that I made the entire interface as open as I possibly could. Every possible action could be mapped to a button on the keyboard, mouse, or joystick. If you wanted to, you could fly the plane using your mouse, and target using the joystick. It was actually pretty revolutionary.

When the reviews came in, a lot of people talked about how great the graphics were (256 planes in the same battle!!), how great the sound was, how great the networking was, etc. Not a word about the UI. Looking around, I almost never see a review where they talk about how good the UI was, despite the fact that a bad UI can totally ruin a good game.

I think now, it’s like that shower temperature thing. When you’ve got it, and it works, you get used to it, and you forget it. But when it’s bad, man, the only review you can count on is one from SomethingAwful.com (warning: SomethingAwful is definitely not for the timid soul).

Here’s a question: Can you think of a single game that stood out because of it’s excellent UI?

<updated>

My wife just pointed out to me that in colleges in Canada and Finland, you can get masters degrees in User Interface (also called Human Interface).