Thoughts on Interaction Design

I bought a PS3 just when it came out last year. It is a really nice console and one of the things that really interest me is using it to play my movies. The interface is very media oriented as it shows ‘video’, ‘pictures’ and ‘music’ prominently in the main menu. I don’t really care much for the pictures and music menus though. I have my pictures on Picasaweb and my music is in iTunes. Why would I copy all of those to the PS3? Unless a future firmware update will allow me to connect to iTunes or to online photo galleries I guess I would never really start using it. Anyway, being able to play my movies is very useful and cool for me!

One very interesting feature that was delivered in the latest firmware update for the PS3 is the ability to play DivX movies. Great! Now I don’t have to re-code all my movies to MP4 anymore, since that was the only format it would play up until now. So now I can happily use the PS3 to what all my movies on my television. A media center should aways provide support for the most common formats per media type. I never understood why Sony only supported MP4 which is not very common yet. Nonetheless, even with DivX support there is still a lot of other stuff to improve in order to make the user experience really good. Here’s a couple of them. Read the rest of this entry »

Yes, another blog. This time I will it will be my own personal blog. But don’t worry, no stories about my dog, children or my super sport car. Not only because I don’t have any of them, but because this blog will only feature stories about matters relating to Interaction Design or simply the use of things.

Every month I’ll try to write an article about something that caught my attention and I will discuss the interaction issues and provide my view on them. Perhaps I may occasionally provide ways to improve the interaction! We’ll see how it goes, for now I simply wish you happy readings.