disKinect
Picking up where I left off yesterday’s post, there was one other thing about the Kinect that I thought was particularly poor, and again, I don’t know whether it is the fault of the Kinect or poor design of the games. The user interfaces were horrendous. I’m not talking about the actual gameplay, but the menus that allow you to select levels or options. On the Wii, menus all work pretty much the same. You point the controller at the screen and move a little hand cursor over the button you want to press, then press a button on the Wiimote. I played or observed three different games using the Kinect, and saw three different conventions for selecting items on the screen.
Fruit Ninja obviously themed its interaction, having you slice the options just as you do the fruit. This appeared to work fairly well. The targets were large and spaced apart enough that I didn’t see anyone accidentally slice the wrong one. Wipeout had large buttons as well, so they were easy to target, but you have to hold your hand over them for several seconds to make them activate. Once your hand is over the button, an animated cursor indicates how long you have left to hold it there. If you accidentally move your hand out of the boundary, it starts over. As a result, it seemed to take an awfully long time to navigate through the UI. Just Dance 3 uses a completely different technique. Each menu item is a slider, kind of like the one for unlocking the iPhone. You have to slowly swipe your hand across the menu item from right to left. Unfortunately, these items were relatively small and stacked fairly tightly, so it was much too easy to accidentally move up or down during the slide, triggering the wrong selection (e.g. selecting the wrong song). I saw this happen repeatedly.
One of the reasons iOS is so successful is that Apple defined a gesture language and demonstrated it with its own software. I guess I don’t know whether or not Microsoft did the same thing for the Kinect, having had so little experience with it, but it certainly doesn’t appear so. For such an interesting input method, I was disappointed with the interface design.
