The Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Interaction Design
Main image: Nintendo Wii Tennis, by rich_lem.
Finally – and here’s what makes it all really come together – in 2007 the market is being opened up by two huge players.
The Apple iPhone is a huge bet that novel interactions, like a multitouch, touch screen interface with gesture recognition, will be easier, more powerful and more enjoyable than traditional button-based interfaces with force feedback.
The Nintendo Wii [see also these interviews] is a bet that, for the mass market, a console for games where you wave around a remote control with not many buttons is more engaging – and more profitable, for Nintendo – than cinema-style graphics and huge narrative-driven games.
Unlike other shifts in technology, this one doesn’t make things harder to use. It’s more mass market and more accessible than the gadgets that just preceded it. To see that, you just have to pick up a Wii remote, or observe how simple the Availabot is to grasp.
We have all the skills, and from Web and social software, all the knowledge we need to be involved. We can be in there, creating things, making better things, right now.
There’s not been so much potential for fun, genuinely new ideas, and business opportunity since, well, the Web itself.
So here’s my obligatory pitch: This is what Schulze & Webb does. We help companies spot what opportunities they have to make products that Generation C will snap up, and help them invent new products and new features, using screen-based interfaces like the Web and mobile, and physical computing and things in the regular product space too.
That’s it for my pitch, and I want to finish with a quote.