Let there be light and dog ears
As I was skimming through the online book 12 Showbusiness Tools for Your Business: A Theatrical Approach to Experience Design, the chapter called “Let there be light” (p. 13) caught my attention for obvious reasons.
It is hard to over-emphasise the importance of light in experience design. There is a fundamental law that our eyes are drawn to movement, and to light (unless it is too bright, which makes us look away). This law is something you can use.
In software, it looks like using animation (movement) to draw people’s attention is quickly gaining ground and highlighting (light) has been in use for many years. In fact, using movement and light in user interfaces can do much more than just draw people’s attention — it can create a sense of flow, make the UI appear “alive”, and really define the experience.
I personally haven’t seen these principles used to their full potential in any software, but apparently Apple’s iPhone does just that with a “Dog Ears User Experience Model“:
In the real world, we have physics. We have inertia. Things bounce and stretch and squash. We have follow through. Imagine a dog with long floppy ears sprinting for a frisbee. Now picture the dog coming to a screeching halt in front of the disc. What happens to the ears? They keep going. Then they “bounce” back. And it’s a big part of what separates a good animator from an amateur.
Even if you don’t notice it consciously, an animation (even of just words) feels more appealing and alive when things move in the virtual world more like things do in the real world (or even more exaggerated). It feels more lyrical, fluid… less abrupt. And that is what the iPhone UI does.
The upcoming book Filthy Rich Clients by Chet Haase and Romain Guy addresses the “how” of building these types of highly interactive applications and is a good read for any Java UI developers. This book goes into how using gradients, transparency, and animation can help you build really cool applications that “suck the user in from the outset and hang onto them with a death grip of excitement” (link). It shows that with a bit of dedicated effort, any application can become a pleasure to use. With that bit of effort, we can make not only usable, but also engaging and enjoyable products.
