One of the many bug-bears I’ve developed working in the software industry is about bad user interfaces. When I was at university I did a course on human-computer interaction, and though I didn’t think it at the time, I realise now just how valuable it was. I firmly believe, now I’ve seen the fruits of so many bad user interface designs, that the course should not only be compulsory, but it should be repeated several times throughout the degree, just to drive the point home.

The particular bit of software that has inspired this rant is the software for this:

my new phone, the O2 Ice. Hardware wise I can’t fault it – sleek, light, good build quality. Software wise, it’s awful. More than awful, its so bad I find myself shaking it in the air and cursing, trying to resit the urge to bash it off the table in frustration. Almost everything in the user interface runs contrary to even basic usability principles. Buttons change function radically as you move between screens, resulting in a single extra accidental button press (of a button that you need to press), will wipe out a laboriously crafted message, without saving it anywhere, or more crucially prompting if you are sure. Conversely, when you are sure about an operation, for example deleting messages, it prompts you, then, just to make you grind your teeth, prompts you to press okay on a screen that says only ‘deleted successfully’. Why do I need to click okay on a message telling me that you’ve done what I asked you (twice) to do. Sure, tell me if it fails, but don’t tell me if it succeeds. I assume it will succeed!

Worst of all though is the behaviour when a new message comes in – I pull the phone from my pocket and see the message prompt displayed on the screen. Great, all good. But because its not a clamshell design, I habitually lock the keypad before putting it into my pocket. And the act of unlocking the phone causes the message prompt to disappear, and I have to go search through three levels of menus to go find the message that’s arrived. And that’s only for SMS messages, if a multi-media message comes in, pressing any key just freezes the display on the animated message icon – no feedback, nothing. Eventually I found out that holding the power key will free things up again, but that was one of the “don’t throw it across the room, it’s the only phone you have” moments.

Fact is, user interface problems aren’t generally hard to solve. Some of them are tricky because you have design constraints (say only being able to use a one button mouse, or limited feedback options. But in general bad user interfaces are down to bad designers, and there is no excuse for it. The end-user does not care, in the slightest, about how good your software is underneath; if it feels like crap to use, then they will hate it, and you have failed.

Games are normally a bit better in this regard, partly because the limited control mechanisms force us to spend more time thinking about input mechanics, but also because a game that doesn’t feel easy to control will drive players away in droves. Even still, it still makes me curse in frustration every time I use a tool that was chucked out of the door with a sub-standard UI, and everyone is stuck with it just because there are no alternatives on the market. (Rational Rose I’m looking at you…)

I generally don’t publish code from the videogames because I don’t believe that code quality is as important in that industry. Short of the occasional patch, once the product is shipped, it’s done; there’s no ten-year lifespan to worry about.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. I don’t even know where to start with it, short of saying that if any games developers are reading it, you should cover your eyes, now.

Finally – corporation tax return finally done for 05/06. Okay, so I’m only 2 months shy of having to do the 06/07 return, but there you go. Many thanks have to go out to Robert Turner and the people at Benson, Wood & Co of Airdrie, who did most of the work. Amount of tax owed: none! It would have been a few hundred pounds due to the fact that the Treasury changed the rules last April to eliminate the lower tax bracket that allowed companies to turn a profit of up to 10,000 UKP without having to pay tax . I guess that’ll teach me for actually running a games company that turns a profit eh? There was me thinking that all the other businesses in the industry losing money hand over fist were doing the wrong thing. 😉

First off, sorry for the hiatus in posting over the last month, the combination of massive busyness with work things and the pressures of finding just the right Christmas gift meant that blogging kept getting shuffled off the bottom of the to-do list. But here I am, bright eyed and bushy tailed, with a big stack of Chrimbo goodies, a newly printed end of year corporation tax return, and a big pile of unfiled paperwork, ready to bore you all to tears again.

It’s a miserable day in Edinburgh today, and the bus on which I write this is filled with coughing, sniffling people. Since it takes me about 45 minutes to get across town to Barco in the morning, I’ve been using the time to get some re-factoring done on the code, as well as writing up various project tenders and plans. There are NDAs to be faxed off too, although that’s mostly because we need to be under NDA to get costs on the development hardware to fill out the rest of the business case. Pete’s proposed a technology project that is interesting, but we need to work out all the numbers to see if it’s a profitable use of our time.

I’m still waiting to see the fall-out of the Christmas period’s sales, but it seems much as I expected so far. Microsoft ‘hit’ their target of 10m X-Box 360s shipped, although I suspect at least some of that is telling retailers and wholesalers to hold stock and they can pay for it later. But some fudging of the numbers seems to be standard practice. Sony seem to be much the same – claiming 1m PS3s shipped, although there are quite a few sightings of PS3s beginning to pile up in shops – the initial surge in demand has been mostly from people buying to re-sell, and its not been backed by any sort of real consumer demand since then. Nintendo are claiming similar but slightly higher numbers, but the crucial difference is that people are actually buying them to use, and its still quite hard to find consoles (and in fact extra controllers or copies of Wii Play) around Edinburgh. But that’s probably to be expected given the lower price point.

Looks like Phillips have finally got a title worthy of recognition supporting the ambX hardware that they were trying to persuade me to develop for last July at Develop Brighton – Supreme Commander were making a big fuss about their ambX support last week. I must admit I like the concept, and it sounds very easy to support, but it can only ever be an afterthought – a polish point for a good title – since the number of people out there who are serious enough to buy it has got to be pretty small. But then I don’t know market demographics on that sort of thing. Certainly I’m happy with headphones for my games, I’m not desperate for a surround sound experience for PC gaming.

Anyway, I’m almost at my destination now, so time to wrap up. I shall endeavour to keep blogging higher up the priority list for the rest of winter; with any luck my schedule will be a little looser now the holiday season is out of the way and the girlfriend is distracted by Rayman Raving Rabbids.

Well, at the risk of sounding like a total Nintendo fanboy: I’m delighted with the Wii! By virtue of some late night queuing at a 24hr Tesco by Pete on Thursday, we picked up a couple of consoles, and Zelda/Rayman. I’ll leave Pete to give his impressions of Zelda, I’ve been looking at Rayman and Wii Sports.

Basically it’s been a great experience right from the start – install went smoothly; all the parts feel solid and well constructed. The Wii-mote and nunchuck have a comforting weight to them, and don’t feel flimsy. I’ve been using the wrist-strap out of paranoia, but haven’t lost control of it yet. Last night was a wine fuelled extended session of Rayman with the girlfriend, who seems just as pleased and hooked by it as I am. I was watching her reactions to it carefully, as she’s really not much of a gamer; however she picked up the controls without any trouble at all, everything seemed natural and intuitive out of the box.

Rayman itself is a little esoteric, but the games make me laugh, and the lovely characterisation of the mad rabbits is fantastic. While I think it has some replay value, I think Wii Sports will probably get played more long term – especially with the fitness training thing. A lot of the Rayman mini-games and Wii Sports  games involve energetic movement, we were having to take it in turns to play as after a few we were out of breath!

Only minor gripe so far has been the fact that the News and Weather channels are offline, and that the Wii Shop channel failed to connect first time round. Other than that the experience has been great, and I’ll certainly be buying at least another Wii-mote (probably with the Play game) for multi-player fun. The girlfriend will probably be taking it to her family over Christmas as well for some fun games too.

Anyway, fan-boy ranting aside, I predict a glowing future for the Wii, and development on it. While the unique control mechanism is interesting and well implemented, I don’t see it standing in the way of traditional console gaming – since you can get just as much control from the wii-mote/nunchuck pairing even without using the motion sensitivity of the controls. I’d love to have the opportunity for us to develop on the platform, but we shall have to see what pans out.

This news about the initial sales figures of the Wii amused me more than a little this morning. So far, pretty much all of the launch titles for PS3 have been unimpressive to say the least. I haven’t got my hands on either console yet, but Zelda, Rayman and even Wii Sports are all looking good, and I’ll be out on the 8th to try and pick up a Wii for myself and Pete. If the Wii’s sales momentum keeps up, it will be looking to eclipse the XBox 360’s by sometime next year, but unless some serious fan support (and better production rates) shows up, the PS3 is looking like a poor cousin. I’m wondering how much of a co-incidence the timing of the Gears of War release is – given that its a much more impressive title for the 360 than I’ve seen to date. We shall have to see how it pans out, but I’m sticking by my early bet on Nintendo.

Its been quiet on the posting front recently, mostly because I’ve been working overtime on my contract role, with various planning and build automation things occupying the extra time. But I’m taking some well deserved time back in the home office this week, and tackling the pile of paperwork that has accumulated in my absence. Double curses to the inland revenue now that I have to deal with VAT returns as well as payroll and corporation tax. When the CBI are complaining about the massive tax burden the UK industry is bearing, they’re talking not just about the amount of tax, but the sheer size of the administration required to keep up with all the obscure rules.

Please note, we’re shifting mail providers just now, so if you send an email and it bounces, please wait a couple of hours and re-send. Thank you.

Update: This should be all working now, if not please comment here. For those interested, we shifted to using Google Mail over Dreamhost’s internal email; mostly because that was the interface I used most when browsing, but also because it means Dreamhost isn’t a single point of failure for us. If DH is down, people can still mail me, and if Google is down, I can use this blog or DH mail as a backup.

We have a winner! Got to love that Potatamoto guy.

Pete and I have been banging our head against tools, makefiles and cross-platform compilation this last week, along with a continuing spree of unit tests. Barco time is sucking up my 9-5 day, but I’ve been working while commuting, and doing paperwork in the evenings. Speaking of which, its time to figure my way round our first VAT return.

Game of the week has to be the Battlefield 2142 demo – big stompy mechs in a combat scenario = much squishing and crunching of bones. Fantastic!

Greg Costikyan announced the other week that the site is now ‘real’ (i.e. bugs are now proper bugs, and not just beta flaws ;-)), so I’ll drop in a link here.

I’ve been browsing the site, and found a bunch of games I want to try, which is surprising, given my cynical take on games these days. Not a lot of time to try though, so I think it may have to be relegated to the 30 minutes on the bus in the morning (I’m at Barco for a brief spell).

I’ve been playing Defcon (available through Steam) a bit – lovely classic game, simple concepts but which combine together to become radically complex when played. I can’t even begin to get my head round some of the strategies needed to be a good player, so I settle for massive early strikes which makes me think I’m doing well, only to be crushed mercilessly by the retaliatory strike. D’oh!

Also got the Battlefield 2142 demo yesterday for a quick blast – looks good, and a decent successor to Battlefield 2 (which has also sucked away some of my precious gaming time). I’ll probably pre-order it, although I’ve got to order a Wii first. Hopefully the rumours of increased production rates are true and the queues for a console will be diminished. Big slap in the face to Microsoft and Sony if that’s true – normally the news is that production rates are less than hoped. I’ve given up bothering on Sony’s continuing stupid press releases and general fumbling of the ball, you can find that elsewhere.

Randomly bumped into one of the few people I’d lost touch with since VIS on the bus last week – Jonny Dobson the director/head of programmer/etc. Still in the industry as an independent (Insurgent Games with Craig Hunter), keeping busy doing consulting work. Yay for a Edinburgh games success story.

Very funny Mac Hall today – describes pretty much every new game artist’s desk.

A mixed bag of work the last couple of weeks, small amounts of work on lots of different projects. Unfortunately Brave came back again, so submission 1.02 had to be made; cross fingers that it goes through okay this time, as the only big bugs remaining were all caused by what seemed to be a faulty burn of the discs.

The only thing that stands out of note is the time I’ve spent writing unit tests for a lot of old code. While I can’t hope to get full coverage on such a large body of work, it has been quite an eye opener. Two major bugs, and a few minors which just never came up (or the code which exercised them managed to work around it in some way). Now I throw up my hands and admit – one of the majors was mine, but everyone who wrote this stuff should have known better. Anyway, a very poignant  reminder of just how useful test driven development is.

For reference, we’re using UnitTest++ by Noel Llopis and Charles Nicholson. Very nice – lightweight, took me 10 minutes to get integrated and compiling a test against our code, and has continued to do its job well through writing 100+ tests now. All in all exactly what a good tool should be – doing its job without me ever having to be aware of it.