entropia

Windows Vista has introduced a bunch of usability features, especially for starting programs. The new Start menu lets you just type a few letters of the name of the program you want to run.

Here’s a new one I just learned: You can start programs in the quicklaunch toolbar by pressing Win+#, where # is the position in the quicklaunch bar.

So I can start IE with Win+1, Notepad++ with Win+2, and Winamp with Win+3.

Via John Robbins’ Blog.

Via Jason Haley.

Via secretGeek’s The Next Mike Gunderloy.

I’ve been playing Need For Speed: Most Wanted lately. I’m going through the “challenge series” mode, which involves racing against time through traffic. And it’s annoying me to no end. Traffic is spawned randomly, and if a car is spawned in front of you around a corner or over a hill, there’s no way to avoid it. No matter how well you drive, you can end up losing because of the traffic. Winning or losing depends on the random number generator.

I’ve also been playing Final Fantasy 5. I really like the Final Fantasy series, but one thing has always bothered me: the spells like Stone, Death, and Sleep. They’re extremely powerful when they work, but they only work occasionally. If the enemy casts one of these spells early in a battle, the battle could be either very easy or impossible, depending on whether it works.

I call this being Devastatingly Random, and it’s something games should never do. The outcome of a battle, or a race, should never be decided solely on random numbers. This is a symptom of bad game design and it is always avoidable.

In Final Fantasy, those spells could be modified so they’re not all-or-nothing. Sleep could make you sleepy after the first call, and actually put you to sleep the second time. Stone could slow you down gradually until finally stopping you. And death could be changed to only work after a certain number of calls.

In Need For Speed traffic could be predetermined. Or there could be indicators to show where traffic will be. Or it could simply not spawn in certain places like around corners or over hills.

A game does not need to be deterministic to avoid Devastating Randomness. One could argue that games like Tetris theoretically suffer from this, because a random series consisting only of “S” and “Z” shapes is unwinnable. But this is not the case because today’s pseudo random number generators are poor enough that that can never happen.

Plus, I only attribute the Devastatingly Random term to things that actually have a “good chance” of happening. Spell failures happen routinely in Final Fantasy. Bad traffic happens a lot in Need For Speed. But if something happens only once in a million or once in a hundred, I say chalk it up to “shit happens” and restart where you last saved.

Back In The Day, there was a belief common among web designers that content that doesn’t appear in the browser window without scrolling would not be seen by Some High Percentage of users. They would liken the situation to that of newspapers, where the editors knew that interesting material on the top half of the front page, “above the fold”, would catch the attention of more readers.

Design blog Boxes and Arrows ran a story called Blasting the Myth of the Fold, which questions this belief.

Screen performance data and new research indicate that users will scroll to find information and items below the fold. There are established design best practices to ensure that users recognize when a fold exists and that content extends below it. Yet during requirements gathering for design projects designers are inundated with requests to cram as much information above the fold as possible, which complicates the information design. Why does the myth continue, when we have documented evidence that the fold really doesn’t matter in certain contexts?

While there’s no question that users are more computer literate than they once were, and content below the fold is more accessible, calling it a myth is incorrect. It all comes down to what “above the fold” really means and what it refers to.

Take a look at the AOL poll used as an example in the article. Pretend that the image shown was the actual voting page, as claimed in the article, and not just the results, so people actually had to scroll way down there to vote. And pretend that 327,478 is a significant number relative to the number of pageviews, which cannot be confirmed or denied. And pretend that the page is just a random page the users stumbled upon without looking for the poll, which is unlikely because there’s no other content on the page; the page was made specifially for the poll, as indicated by the header. Even if this were all true, it doesn’t prove anything. Here’s why.

Look at the “above the fold” content. It consists of a few banners, some unrelated headlines, the poll header, and an introduction to the poll. So, the poll starts above the fold. This is akin to a front-page headline that reads “Awesome Amazing Story on page 2″.

How is this supposed to show the “Myth of the fold”?

Of course, I’m doing the same thing here that Milissa Tarquini did in her article: cherry-picking evidence and burning straw-men. I’ve ignored the ClickTale.com data she presented and, even though I demolished her AOL example, I haven’t provided contrarian evidence.

Here’s the bottom line: the fold does matter. Think about it. Put yourself in your users’ shoes. Imagine you’re going to some sites you’ve never been to, looking for information about some product. When you open the first site you see things like “Buy it now” buttons, links to other products made by the same company, ads, and background information about the company. On the second site you see most of the same stuff, plus a large area in the middle of your screen that reads “This product is the bee’s knees, the cat’s meow, and the flea’s eyebrows¹“. At which page would you be more likely to stick around?

On the other hand, if you’re browsing blogs, or looking for a certain bit of information you believe in on the page you’re reading, or just on a page you’ve been to a few times already, it doesn’t really matter where the fold is. But for a business’s homepage, you’d better be sure the top 600 rows of pixels make it clear to the user who you are, what you do, and what your products are. In fact, Milissa agrees with this:

Functionality that is essential to business strategy should remain (or at least begin) above the fold. For example, if your business success is dependent on users finding a particular thing (movie theaters, for example) then the widget to allow that action should certainly be above the fold.

What it all comes down to is that the content doesn’t need to be above the fold, but the hook does.

Disclaimer: I’m not a designer and I probably don’t know what I’m talking about.

1. I’d never heard of that last one either, but Dictionary.com says it’s something [↩]

Reviews of Metroid Prime 3 have all touted the game’s great controls (see Gamespot, IGN, 1up, and GameSpy). But I doubt any of the reviewers are left-handed.

I am left-handed, and the controls are frusterating. Movement is handled with the nunchuck stick. Aiming is handled with the wiimote. The problem is, I’m used to doing all this with my left hand. Every game in the history of the universe has assigned movement controls to the left hand, so holding the nunchuck in my right hand feels wrong. And aiming with my right hand is unnatural - a little like holding your phone in the opposite hand.

Mario Strikers posed a similar challenge: you move with the nunchuck and aim with the wiimote when controlling the goalie. But there, I was able to switch hands whenever I needed to aim because you never had to do both at once.

With Zelda there were only a few situations where you had to aim while moving. I remember those being the hardest parts of the game for me.

This shows a problem inherent to the wiimote-nunchuck scheme: the controllers are too disconnected. The solution is the Wii Zapper:

It probably wouldn’t work with Metroid, because it makes most of the wiimote buttons inaccesible, but the benefits are clear: it connects the controllers into a single unit so your arms are working together.