Thoughts on Interaction Design

YouTube's LeanBack

YouTube launched LeanBack this week. I think this is a great step forward in what watching TV could be in the future. You get your our personalized feed but you can also select categories and get a recommendation there.

The good part here is that it is all personalized. So you see what you like! Well, in theory that is. Leanback seems to think I like ‘tractor races’ which I can assure you I don’t like at all!!! Quite some things to improve there. A couple of things are missing still. For example:

• Browse content by type, series, movies etc. Nice to leanback but if I am interested in Top Gear I don’t want to skip all the other rubbish that shows up when search for it.
• Mark your favourites, after all if I watch something it doesn’t necessarily mean I like what I see… So there should be some kind of thumbs up/down mechanism so that personalized suggestions will get better and better.
• Define your own ‘channels’ using tags. So my sport channel would be ‘+F1 +Racing -Soccer’, meaning car racing and Formula 1 but no soccer please.
• There should be a way to see when new content will be available. It matters to me knowing when the new episode of Lost will be first available and will appear in my personal feed. Perhaps show it grey’ed out in my feed?

Anyway, nice to see YouTube is going for it. My guess is that Google TV will look similar….

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. (more…)