I'm Sorry, It's My Fault

So I was listening to Pandora (www.pandora.com) tonight and came across this:

I thought this was an excellent example of positive feedback and design. For those who have never used Pandora, it is an Internet radio, but customizable so that it will tailor itself to your specific listening style. This post is not about Pandora as a service, but specifically about the displayed error message. Normally, the area in question would display information about the current artist and song that is playing, but unfortunately and error has occurred. Instead of coming straight out and saying "An error has occurred" or saying nothing at all, like most sited would do, Pandora takes a very nice and polite approach. The massage makes you feel nice, like there is another person on the other side controlling everything, or some other form of sentience, and they are taking full responsibility of the problem. Personally, this made me actually feel a little better about it, as if i could just say, "Hey, don't worry about it, these things happen. Go ahead and try again." Even though, I know for a fact, there is not another person on the other side the way the message is presented, makes it feel as if there is.

This is just another excellent example of a program taking on a human personality and certainly providing excellent feedback to the user.

Good Design

At er reading through the book, The Design of Everyday Things, I have noticed many things that have both a good and bad design. Although the design that I have picked to be my favorite design I've known about for awhile, I still believe it is good.

Back in Akron, Ohio, in the mall, there is an interactive advertising system that I thought had a very good interface. It is made by a company called Reactrix, which I recently found out went bankrupt.

Their advertising was essentially a projector on the ceiling that displayed the images on the floor. You could interact with the projected images by moving over them. By using infrared cameras to track movement, there can be many people interacting at the same time. They made them fun to play with too. There were things such as popping balloons, racing games, shooting games, and anything else they could think of. It was a fun way to kill long periods of time, and I'm sure some businesses were trying to sell stuff too.

By making the advertisements interactive, more people would pay attention to them instead of just walking past without even looking. I believe it was a very novel idea, and they are certainly not the only company that has been using the technology, just not very good with their book keeping.

I can only imagine using this kind of technology to interact with a regular home computer. Being able to do things with just the wave of your hand. Of course it still needs a lot of improvement to compare to a keyboard and mouse but its a step in the right direction.