The Experience Stack
Images from Gizmodo and Answers.com.
The third example i want to talk about briefly is the Nintendo Wii.
The Wii is important for two reasons. First it has physicality as Don Norman says. It gives us a much larger gamut of experience to paint with.
So when you want something to feel tense and careful and precise, that can be done by doing something precarious with the Wiimote. But of course we don’t know what these qualities are before actually trying it out, so the Wiimote is great because it lets us experiment in this coming world of physical computing and tangible interactions.
It’s really compelling this stuff. After using my Wii just once, going back to TV was a terrible experience. I kept waving my remote control at the screen, trying to point to the programme I wanted to watch. It’s so rare to have a new technology which is more compelling and easier to use than the one before.
So I just like using the Wii and the Wiimote, and observing, and learning.
The Wii is great for this for the second of these two reasons: the Wiimote is hackable. It runs on Bluetooth, and people have reverse-engineered the protocol, so now you can use the wiimote to feed into your computer, influence things on screen, experiment with new interfaces. You know, join it into Quartz Composer too maybe.