Information Design II:

Direct the Video: An example of misuse and underuse of object affordances


http://www.gogirlsonly.org/games/

In his book, “The Design of Everyday Things”, Norman states that designers should take advantage of affordances, or perceived properties of how something could be used, to provide clues for usability. While playing “Direct the Video”, an online game accessible from the Girl Scout of the USA website, I felt that game designers did not take advantage of objects’ affordances to guide me through the experience in a natural way. In fact, at times I felt they used incorrect representations which compelled me to try to execute actions which resulted in no feedback. All in all, I was unclear whether my actions would return the desired result as the game progressed.

When you launch the game you are able to place your cursor over one of four characters you can select to star in a music video you direct. Your cursor turns into a pointer, indicating you should be able to click on a character to execute an action. When you click, however, nothing happens. Placing your cursor on each character only returns a phrase spoken from each character. Each sound bite blends into other characters’ sound bites as you move your cursor around. This results in an annoying clashing of noise (Yikes!). The use of event-driven sound is prevalent throughout the site and at times does little to enhance the user’s experience. The sound is not iconic, reminding me of a slot machine. Because you are designing a music video and need to hear the sound of the final product, you can’t turn off these sounds and are stuck with them throughout the game.

But I digress…I was talking about affordances! In the section where you choose your music for the video, you see four CD’s with a musical style labeled on each. When you hover your cursor over each CD, you hear the music that would be played as part of your video. When you click each CD, you receive no feedback and are unclear whether you’ve selected the music for the video. I like use of CD’s as a representation, but feel it would be more intuitive if users dragged the CD to a CD player. This would better assure the user that the CD selected would be played in the video. I like the section where you drag pictures to a filmstrip which represents scenes in the background of the video, but felt that additional guidance could have been helpful the first time out.