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Sep
14
2007
UI Design Issues
Sep 14, 2007By: John Carpenter
I've just read news that the iPhone recently surpassed the one million sales mark. This is great news for two reasons. First, it shows that mobile devices are being accepted as far more than simple communication devices. And secondly, clean and simple UI rules.
PhoneTag Elite spent a good portion of the development time building the UI and working on the interface to ensure maximum playability. What I've noticed in the past is that most mobile games have an abysmal or unintuitive UI and that seriously impacted the players enjoyment of the game. UI built into most mobile devices is non-intuitive and employs far too many animated icons which only serve to confuse navigation. [iPhone excluded of course]
In designing the UI we were looking for a control that was simple to use, could be controlled with one hand and was visually appealing to the end user. To accomplish this we started be completely gutting any of the existing UI models from the phone and built our own from scratch. While requiring a lot more coding effort I felt if we build our own UI we could control the consistency of the look through the multitude of devices.
This was not without issues. Many of the devices have limited device memory and we had to be very cautious about not overloading the memory with graphics or risk slowing the response times of the controls or worse crashing the device (it happens). On top of that each device we were working with had its own unique memory requirements and access times. In order to provide a consistent UI we had to construct a rendering engine and menu pipeliner to optimize the rendering of the UI components on the screen regardless of its individual constraints. The result was a UI system that can display complex graphics without hindering the rest of the device.
In designing the proper UI animation sequences we wanted to choose something that was intuitive to the user, took cues from existing UI designs and fit into the overall game theme. Our first issue with the design came up last week. Since the game is an outdoor game we need to ensure that the menu is visible in poor lighting conditions such as a really bright day. We increased the contrast on the device and added additional visual cues to tell the user what menu item is being selected. We will look at tweaking the design for the next couple of months with more testing and feedback. When I get a chance I'll post some of the screenshots.
Unfortunately, PhoneTag Elite won't be available for the iPhone until they can come up with some sort of location technology. Right now the iPhone doesn't posses any sort of geolocation capabilities. One promising technology comes from the people at Loki/Skyhook Wireless. If they can manage to integrate their technology into the iPhone we can port the game over to those million plus active users. Until then you can always browse the site from your iPhone.
PhoneTag Elite spent a good portion of the development time building the UI and working on the interface to ensure maximum playability. What I've noticed in the past is that most mobile games have an abysmal or unintuitive UI and that seriously impacted the players enjoyment of the game. UI built into most mobile devices is non-intuitive and employs far too many animated icons which only serve to confuse navigation. [iPhone excluded of course]
In designing the UI we were looking for a control that was simple to use, could be controlled with one hand and was visually appealing to the end user. To accomplish this we started be completely gutting any of the existing UI models from the phone and built our own from scratch. While requiring a lot more coding effort I felt if we build our own UI we could control the consistency of the look through the multitude of devices.
This was not without issues. Many of the devices have limited device memory and we had to be very cautious about not overloading the memory with graphics or risk slowing the response times of the controls or worse crashing the device (it happens). On top of that each device we were working with had its own unique memory requirements and access times. In order to provide a consistent UI we had to construct a rendering engine and menu pipeliner to optimize the rendering of the UI components on the screen regardless of its individual constraints. The result was a UI system that can display complex graphics without hindering the rest of the device.
In designing the proper UI animation sequences we wanted to choose something that was intuitive to the user, took cues from existing UI designs and fit into the overall game theme. Our first issue with the design came up last week. Since the game is an outdoor game we need to ensure that the menu is visible in poor lighting conditions such as a really bright day. We increased the contrast on the device and added additional visual cues to tell the user what menu item is being selected. We will look at tweaking the design for the next couple of months with more testing and feedback. When I get a chance I'll post some of the screenshots.
Unfortunately, PhoneTag Elite won't be available for the iPhone until they can come up with some sort of location technology. Right now the iPhone doesn't posses any sort of geolocation capabilities. One promising technology comes from the people at Loki/Skyhook Wireless. If they can manage to integrate their technology into the iPhone we can port the game over to those million plus active users. Until then you can always browse the site from your iPhone.
about
John
John is an accomplished Geomatics Engineer and programmer. He has 7 years direct experience in the wireless location industry, spanning from hardware deployments and position determination algorithm research using neural networks, to end-user applicatio...(more)
Recent Articles by John
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UI Design Issues
September 14, 2007 -
First Release
September 03, 2007
