Computer Games and the Media Equation

The purpose of computer games has always been to get the player to think as if he is actually within the game. From the way that the player on screen responds to the commands thrust at it from the user, each and every game is geared towards this very aim. Not surprising then when looking at the media equation and the way we view computers as social actors in interactions.

The media equation says that humans will see objects either on computer, or part of a game, or even on TV as something human when in fact it is merely a representation of real life. With computer games this is much more apparent as the whole interface is made in a very different way to traditional applications. In a traditional application the user would not expect to see personality on screen and often most users, especially if they are NOT complete novices, see personality like the paper clip in MS Word as being annoying. Nevertheless, the absence of personality and of those personal interactions are seen as strange in a computer game.

Therefore, from a HCI design point of view, I believe different circumstances demand different levels of personality. Whereas a game may demand a complete absorbance of the user into the interface, a word processor would need to be more of a “do what I say” interface where it just performs tasks efficiently. Therefore, it is of paramount importance that the interface of an application is geared towards the required output rather than a blanket good/bad interface requirement. This means that what is good for one application may not be good for another.

Media Equation for Children

The media equation as my colleague has explained below is the way people respond to media in a fundamentally social manner and how they treat computers as social actors in interactions.

However, I will now consider how this affects children in particular. The background to the media equation is that due to our minds not having evolved fast enough to deal with these new concepts, is this true also of children that they react in the same way as adults in dealing with computer interfaces as social actors?

From my research, I have found many interesting findings. The first interesting finding was that children seemed to respond in the same manner regardless of the personality of the computer. Whether the computer praised them for their performance or not they reacted in the same manner. This has some important implications for the design of an interface as it means that it is not as important for it to be as positive as was previously thought. However, this does not mean that it is worthless being positive as the findings did show a very slight level of increase in the level of answers given. On the whole, children’s software currently is presented in a very positive manner regardless of whether the child gets the answer right or wrong. However, from the findings it can be seen that adults seem to be more affected by these things than children do.

However, one significant area that children are more affected by the media equation than adults is where the computer comes across as a team mate. Where the computer made suggestions the children were far more likely to follow the advice and make changes to their answers. Although the finding were not statistically significant they were found to be much more than the way adults responded.

Furthermore, boys were found to be far more influenced than girls in the suggestions the computer made when investigating the effects of team formation.

The implications of these findings are that when designing interfaces for children, they must be set apart from those of adults. Aside from the usual brighter colours and rounded graphics, it is perhaps far more important to design the interface in a friend like manner where the computer takes the child through the software/site/application just as a parent or teacher would in real life.

Moreover, with children, due to the fact that they are usually in the stage of learning and experimentation, then they adapt much quicker to a personality than adults do. Therefore, more care must be taken with design of the way information is sequenced rather than they personality of the computer. Furthermore, presentation is far more important in terms of colour and style as children react more positively to a brighter and more interactive display.

What colors?

Just a quick blog here...mostly off the back of thinking about the Hex game. I was thinking from a usability perspective what colors would be best for games where both players need the colours to stand out when looking at one of them. For example when player 1 is white then looking at the board he/she should see white as being dominant, and for black he/she should see black as dominant.

If anyone bothers reading these blogs please add some comments about what colours are used in the games that you play.

Yellow and Red - Connect 4
Orange and Blue - Make 5

What else is there?


Just to relate this to HCI sometimes you don't want just one section to stick out, but you want the user to not be distracted by other parts of your interface when focusing on one section. That is one of the reasons why scrolling text is very very bad HCI. Yet some sites insist on these java applets which scroll text and flash colors at you. Luckily most sites have moved away from the philosophy that because I can I should.

One idea would be to use the mouse as a pointer to what the user is focusing on and then change other parts of the interface depending on that. For example if I were to hover my pointer over an article on a page with 3 or 4 such posts then the program should recognise this and grey out other areas. This would enhance the focus of the user. However, it could also be very annoying as it would mean that to see something my mouse would constantly have to be in the right place.

Smooth Scrolling

Did u ever get confused on one of them sites where u click on a link and it takes u to the 30th paragraph on a page filled with enough text to be in a government report. Well a cool feature I came across which I believe encapsulates the idea of HCI is a JavaScript function which instead of jumping all the way down....or jumping all the way up, scrolls through until it reaches the section you wanted.

Although not exactly ground breaking, it is a feature that adds those small things to an interface which all add up to a good user experience. From a HCI design perspective, all interfaces need to show the user what is happening rather than just doing things from a functionality point of view. That means that interfaces should include loading bars to inform the user how long it will take to finish the process and other features such as scroll bars that change size depending on how much input there is in the text box.

Click here to view the scroll effect in action

or here to view the actual code for the script

Furthermore, another feature that I saw using JavaScript (can't remember the site now) was that when a user clicked on a text box to type something in, the web page immediately put a red border around the box. In effect its these small features that add to the usability of a site or application.

Plain and Simple

As most of the internet community has noticed, since the advent of brilliantly simple interfaces such as Google and others, more and more sites (mostly businesses) have gone down the road of keeping the initial interface very streamlined.

This is an excellent example of where HCI has impacted upon the designers of such interfaces. With previous interfaces the aim used to be to present as much information as possible in a structured manner, but most designers have now realised that using HTML tools they can hide and show different parts of the interface very easily. Furthermore they can, using cookies and other techniques, personalise the site for further visits. This means that as each user has his own preferences and interests that he wishes to persue, then he can focus in on these interests.

One side effect of the simplicity of the interface design, is the powerful use of menus. Most sites tend to employ a wide based structure for menus which cover a large part of the site with a few clicks. These menus often allow the site to narrow down to the interests of the user very easily. From the basic home page the user can then go to the page (s)he wants at the click of a few buttons.

From the basic HTML that used to be around a few years ago, the internet has come a long way. Even flash seems to be used very little in menus and pages as javascript has made it much simpler to hide and show various parts of the interface at the click of a few buttons.

The interface I will discuss now is that of GMail.com, Google's recent venture into the internet based email market. It has a very simple design to it coded almost entirely in JavaScript. It has a menu on the left hand side which details the categories of emails such as Inbox, Sent Mail, Spam etc. Below this it has a menu which has the ability of being hidden. This contains the labels that a user may give to his emails. I will not go into the way labelling works but this can be Googled by searching for a review on GMail.

The neatness of GMail's interface is in the way they present all information as text, in a confined area and still get a very good level of communication between the user and his email. They do not over burden the user with ads or pictures that may be distracting (i mean isn't the whole point of banner ads to lure the user away from his email into buying something), but instead they present the user's email to them in a simple manner.

The side menu takes very little room as it is mere text and so creates a lot of space for the main parts of the interface. This enables features such as email snippets and other info to be all shown on just one line. This tends to make the interface consistent with conditions such as different resolutions and window sizes. Moreover, if you've tried to make the window smaller, the way they have designed it the snippet just gets smaller without forcing the any change in the interface. In other words unlike other interfaces it is very rigid in presenting information in exactly the same way time after time. This is very important as the user needs to have a mental picture of how the interface works so that it becomes something (s)he does not need to think about when using it.

Google Keywords


The trick to getting the page you want in a search engine is all about the type of words or phrases you use. You use the wrong words and u'll get the wrong results. Therefore, often what happens is that I do a simple search of what I want, which I know will return hundreds of thousands of results, and then I look through the first couple to see if they meet my match. When they don't I refine the search either by using more specific terms or I hone in on the required result by including more search terms.

The idea of a good piece of software is that it should assist the user in all ways that it can to make life easier and make the usage of the software more efficient. I add a word of caution here that efficient doesn't in fact mean good software, just efficient software. But anyhow, if the software is efficient and on top of that has good usability like google does, then it should make an attempt to push the user in the right direction to maximise its possibilities.

Now, my proposition is that from a HCI perspective, Google does do most things a user would want, but what it doesn't do is help to get the perfect phrases that a pinpointed search would achieve. Therefore, I think they should have a Keyword system which perhaps computes, using facts from previous similar searches and their pagerank system, the possibilities that the user can input to get a better search. A much better version than kelkoo currently has, I must add, because kelkoo's version is very poor and hardly returns better results than the current search u may have done.

The fact that Google in the background can perform lots of queries with different phrasing based on the search of the individual would help enormously as they could show some sort of benchmark against the current search. In this way there would be a greater level of interactivity between the user and his searches, thus resulting in a better solution.


Opening Train Doors

What is the best place to put the open button for a mechanical door? A simple question you may say but in fact it can have a huge impact on the response time of someone opening the door.

Going home from uni the other day I was on one of them older style Central Trains where I noticed the difficulty a few of the passengers had when approaching the internal doors of the train which separates the seating area from area around the doors.

A girl walked up to the door expecting it to open, but on realising it was not automatic she started looking for the button to open it. Naturally she looked at her eye level, which must have been about 5' 7", for a button but she did not find any on the door itself. A boy who was seated on the luggage area seeing the button, which was actually closer to him than to her, pressed it for her.

This raises a couple of points for designing an interface, firstly that the system should do those things automatically without need for user intervention which the user expect the system to do. Furthermore, buttons, menus, etc should be at the user's eye level, or more importantly somewhere where he/she expects it to be.

They happen to have solved the problem on the latest model of the trains by putting the button on the actual door, but better still making the door automatic so that as you walk towards it opens at the appropriate speed. One problem I've noticed however, is that if you stand directly beneath it, the detector doesn't notice and starts to close the door.

Also they use much brighter colours and bigger signs on the new trains making it easier to see the button and realise at a glance what to do.

That is probably the purpose of HCI, that at a glance the user is able to understand what to do and how to do it. This may be a reason why computer games seem to exhibit good HCI behaviour, especially when talking about FPS or Adventure games where the person becomes the character in the game

Nokia 7280 - Wacky or Wonderful?

When I first saw this phone I thought to myself, now where are the damn buttons! Turns out that Nokia have gone for a completely revolutionary design in creating a phone like none other before.



As part of their fashion range they have released the models 7280, 7270, 7260 and a few other gems for the hip. Not only does this stick style phone come packed with features such as an FM Radio, bluetooth, allows synchronisation with Apple for photos, audio files and video clips, allowing also for a voice activated interface, but also it is a sleek small and light phone(as light as 8310) with integrated HIDDEN digital camera and the usual Nokia phone features.

Wait you may be saying, in terms of HCI this is a disaster, no keys means impossible texting, but that is where you are wrong. Nokia have installed a iPod style dial which they call the NaviSpinner which can not only be used to scroll through the menus but also can be used to type text messages. I dont know if you've ever used a remote controlled GPS satellite navigation system in a car, but basically that works using the same principle as the NaviSpinner. At first all the letters will be available, but as letters are selected by process of accessing a dictionary the possible next letter is cut down to the possible ones. On the whole it works pretty well in a car and I see no problems with it being applied to text messaging.



The whole design on the 7280 is made for the type of funky music hearing partying guy/girl, which is probably why it is so suprising that an mp3 player has not been included with this. This would probably have set this aside from other phones in that its design is neat enough to pass off as a multimedia device. Perhaps Nokia are considering making a 7280i version soon.

In my opinion this model will probably take off quite easily and may succeed where others have failed due to the sheer cleverness of the design. Unusual it may be but then again so was the iPod when it came out.

First Blog

This is a HCI blog based on a theme concerning those objects which exhibit such behaviours which are useful for a computer scientist to analyse and implement in future products and projects. This is so that one can create a finished product which is not only easy to use but also meets the useability requirements in such a way that each product adapts to its environment completely.

From previous readings, a Bill Gates' book called Business at the Speed of Thought: Using a Digital Nervous System, talks at length about the need of adapting to change, both short and long term, just as the body adapts to a change and responds as quickly as possible depending on what conditions arise. Let us take the example of putting your finger on the stove for example, the response there is so immediate that the brain is not consulted, rather the spine carries out the command. Similarly, in an organisation or a project, if we take software project management, some changes need to be made so immediately that not reacting to the market or to customer's tastes and preferences, may result in a complete turnaround of fortunes.

I'm just waffling now...so i'll stop....but yes...this is a flavour of what you can expect!

As the name of the blog suggests, as a group we will most probably talk about individual pieces of technology which exhibit signs of HCI, on quite a regular basis.