Sunday, January 27, 2008

Exercise 5 - Adamn Oliver


Let's start with an 'object', and i use that term loosely, that i hate. I hate all DVD player programs on my computer. One of them, Nero Showtime came with the actual DVD drive and the Ati DVD player came with my video card. They are such horrible piece of poop designs. The image provided are the controls for both of them. In terms of affordance there are way too many options. It takes me forever to find the button for the root menu. In terms of visibility some of the buttons are really small and don't even have an image that represent their function. There is no constraint on these players the designers opted for a 'cool' looking interface and disregarded usability.

Now the player i love is Divx player. It plays most movie files on computers (.avi, .div, .mpg...) but was designed to play divx files. Divx is a format that was essentially created for best quality video with a smaller disc size (for downloaded movies!!!). It's interface is simple and easy to use there are really only four main buttons and it's very intuitive. The designers of this player definitely took affordance into consideration. When you are playing a movie full screen and then click the screen and mini version of the interface will pop up allowing you to move forward or backward stop adjust the volume, etc. My only complaint is that it doesn't play DVDs. Not only is it cheaper to download shows and movies than rent them but it's easier to watch them too. :)

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