Sony and how to fail at Interface Design

Opinion from Matt - Wednesday, 24 November 2010 @ 1:33pm

I'm going to just say it outright. Sony have always excelled as a hardware maker.

The PSP is a good example. Combining a high quality screen with processing capable of playing games unthinkable on any other handheld, the PSP is a marvel of hardware. It has unlimited expandability due to its forward thinking memory stick support (now implemented in DSi) and love it or hate it the UMD medium was probably the only option at the time and did the job well.

There's also the PS3. As a "piece of kit" it's a solid one. Blu-ray player, high end graphics processor, and an innovative architecture on the CPU system that in some ways holds back the hardware, but also provides a higher performance ceiling for later development.

They have always done well at hardware, from TVs to stereos to portable players. They're one of the few technology manufacturers apart from Apple who are aware that image matters, and that look and gloss are a part of selling a product. At least, if you're going to overprice it compared to technically identical equivalents.

They hire some of the best industrial designers in the world to make bold and exciting products, and spend millions on research and development to ensure they're world-leading.

So why do they get a kid with Downs to make their fucking interfaces?

The level of ass-backwards tardery in any Sony interface is seriously strange considering the effort they go to in other areas of development, marketting, etc.

Using Sony software often makes me question the QA process in place. Not just how it works, but whether there even is one. Interfaces should pass rigorous testing and review internally to make sure they work. Did Sony do this? Does a team of skilled interface people file bug reports and improvements? And if so do they file them directly down the toilet, or are they stamped and confirmed by a team leader in some sort of established documented process before being chucked in the shitter?

The PSP

I've bought a lot of Sony products in the past. I have a PS3 and PSP for example. I like the hardware but the actual interface has always been baffling. It's not just the interface in terms of human interaction either. The PSP used to be my choice of music player as a rejector of the current Applearchy. Pity it was shit.

And it was always shit. Specifically from a UI point of view.

Early on it was especially bad, with the PSP having to have all of its music in a directory called MP3. Excitingly the mobile phone I used at the time was also a Sony (-Ericsson) and used the exact same memory card. Compatible, ooh! Except for one thing. The phone had to have its music stored in a directory called Music.

Other stupidities abounded when trying to update the firmware. It's really easy with a wireless network... but without it... Jesus Elvis Christ. You had to go to their website (the US one, because the update never was on the AU one) and agree to their terms and conditions to download the file. Then you had to switch the PSP to USB mode, and connect to it. Then you had to navigate to it and create an UPDATE directory in the GAME directory and copy the EBOOT.PBP file you downloaded into that new folder. Then you had to switch back to normal mode and go to the game section in the XMB and run the update, agreeing to its terms and conditions again to enable the update. And weirdly (and this still happens) the PSP battery must be 100% full to update. 80% full and plugged into the wall? Not good enough. Society could crumble!

Making you jump through hoops like that just to update their firmware seems like punishment for some crime I'm pretty sure I'm not interesting enough to have committed. It seems far more logical that you just write some decent software to do all of the above when you press the “update my psp firmware” button. All of this is made much easier if you have wireless networking, but why is wireless networking a requirement for a portable games console with minimal online play?

Even with everything playing and working perfectly there's something wrong with the PSP as a music player. I don't just mean “something wrong” in the same way you'd say there's “something wrong with this sandwich” because you think the chick at the shop may have gotten a bit of mayonnaise on the bread and it tastes funny. I mean “something wrong” like there's “something wrong with that guy”, in reference to a slightly chubby man wearing a bike helmet while staggering down the street who just stopped to wet himself. “Something wrong” in both of these cases is a euphemism for retarded.

Media Go - Not pictured: awful interface being badly used

The best example is the way it lists content. For a start there's no playlist support. There's something called “groups” but I couldn't figure out what that was supposed to do. The music you have lists in a long list. You can't put things into folders above one category deep, so while you can group an album you can't group by an artist then an album, for example.

The listing of “general” music is marginally less helpful and information rich than a potato sandwich. You can't search. At all. Looking for “Resistance” by Muse? Hope you enjoy scrolling down. Looking for “Ziggy Stardust” by David Bowie? Hope you enjoy scrolling. Looking for “All We Know” by Paramore? Hope you enjoy coming out of the closet. And scrolling.

The worst thing is that you can't actually sort by anything other than the default option. And it's not the title. Oh no. That would be weird. It's the filename. The actual name of the file. On the disk. So if you've grabbed a few files from random albums and they're called “01 – Spark – From the Choir Girl Hotel” and “02 – Eleanor Rigby”, then guess what? They're going to be right at the start. Forever. No matter what. The really fun thing about that is that you can't actually see or edit the filename in any way, so you're limited to a single search option that isn't visible to the user? Brilliant.

Hope you like your music dumped in a giant list!

What Sony have consistently failed to appreciate is that the value of the product lies not just in the capability of the hardware itself, but it in the ability for users to actually get access to it. It's not just about good hardware. It's about interacting your hardware with your other hardware, interacting your hardware with the user's PC.

I tried to use Sony's own Media Go software for this, to test it again with the latest possible version before writing this article. It failed to install with a weird runtime error. Some searching on google showed me a solution that involved messing with my registry and I got it working. But honestly, should I have to do that?

It's in this area that the PSP has the most unused potential. You can't copy files directly from a PS3 to a PSP or vice versa. Got music on them you want on the other? I have Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on both devices and yet Sony expect me to plug in a cable. Why?

Why can't my PSP function as a nifty little remote control? There's remote play, but that's strangely limited. You can't watch even DVDs on that, and few games support it.

Does anyone remember the announcement that you will be able to make a transfer of a movie from a Bluray disk to a PSP free? Because I do.

The PSP's interface still includes an option for your camera. You know, the PSP camera accessory... which has been in the interface for literally years and came out last month.

The PS3

I recently had to set up a new PS3 and was reminded of some of the strange decisions that have been made. For example, when you go through the setup process you have to enter text several times. Rather than using the same interface this text input uses two utterly different interfaces to put in your text. One is a standard "qwerty" keyboard, which is a little clumsy to navigate using a controller, but generally adequate. The other is like one of the punishments from Aligieri's The Inferno, a torture designed to crush the spirit and hope of any forced to use it. It's this multi-tap abomination of a thing, unintuitive and inconsistent. And completely inexplicable.

Why oh why would you have two different ways to enter text, within 10 minutes of each other in a process? And most particularly, why would you go from one setup option which is relatively convenient for humans, and then switch to something from the Book of Revelations?

The level to which Sony fail at software is clearly visible in the recent 3.0 firmware update. Not even the update itself – the number.

If you know jack shit about software development (and if you don't, do you want a job at Sony?) you'll know that the version number given to software has multiple parts divided by decimal points, in this case two, but 3 or 4 is common. An update to the numbers suggests a smaller update which each successive number.

World of Warcraft provides a good real-world example. 3.0.0 was the release of Wrath of the Lich King, a major update to the core software. 3.1 brought major new additions such as the first new raids instance and the addition of dual specs. By contrast 3.1.3 tweaked certain character talents and fixed a few bugs. 4.0 is the Cataclysm update that enhances the engine ready for the Cataclysm launch. 4.0.1 fixed all the shit they broke when they did that.

Sony's firmware 3.0 by their own admission contains nothing major, just some cosmetic tweaks and new links. So why the major version update? The only possible reason I can think of is they have no idea what they're doing and just thought it sounded nice. Sony's numbering system appears to have been formulated by their marketing department. Hey, maybe they do the programming as well? That would explain a lot.

The interface has had a few other additions. The top right now has a panel that contains the information you need to know. There are icons but they don't make much sense. First is the people who are offline and the people who are online on your friends list. A little icon shows grey (and sad!) for the people offline, and white smily for those who are online, along with a counter. By which I mean it counts those who are online, but not offline. Which makes me wonder – why do I need an icon for that. Also, why do I even need to know this at all? 12 of my friends list are online? Ok!

Moving across there's your incoming messages. This is represented by a universally recognised “mail” icon. I assumed that the mail icon meant I had a message. It was only later that I found out that the mail icon is always there. Not only that but the interface doesn't change at all if you have a message! As best I can tell this icon is conveying the information that messages exist as a abstract concept – not that you have any or that you don't. Thanks, Sony. (Note: this seems to have been fixed since I wrote it. Dammit.)

Next along is a clock. This is fair. I complained a lot about the clock in previous versions of the firmware/software, more particularly the lack of a clock. They clearly listened to me. I'm very influential.

But now they've gone overboard. Next to the digital clock is a small analog clock. Yes, there are now two clocks next to each other on the interface. That's a 100% more clocks than the Xbox “New Experience”. Take that, Microsoft fanbois! We have more clocks than you!

I bet that's on the box for the next versions of the PS3. “More clocks than any other console. A truly next generation Time Telling experience”.

While we're on additions to 3.0, Sony obviously decided it was time the friends list got a look over, and felt that what was needed was a hideous grey box around every friend contact, to make damn sure that their icons look stupid and their name is harder to read.

You still can't upload your own icons, either, by the way. What if I don't want to look like Clank from Ratchet and Clank? What if I don't want to be just another Locoroco? What if I don't want my online gaming existence to be personified by the icon for Flow, or Nathan Drake looking smug?

Naturally the things that needed changing haven't been. The interface is still kind of dull. The Playstation 3 is a marvel of technology, capable of detailed 3d graphics. I don't know why we don't see any of that in its interface. I like simple, but the XMB system is just TOO simple. There's nothing interesting about it at all.

Imagine if the same basic interaction was presented as a 3D world, first person style. Left and right rotated you, then forward and backward popped you into those options. You could theme the whole thing, with detailed models for a game to start, standing screens displaying promo videos, etc. The whole system could be themed (much like World of Warcraft) for events such as Halloween, Christmas, etc, or to promote new games.

All I'm saying is that while the interface interaction system is fine there surely are better ways to present it.

Areas the PS3 could excel at have continued to be ignored. The Media interfaces still leave a lot to be desired. There's still no way to sort video by any sort of category or type (TV Shows, Movies, Game Trailers, Porn, etc). The best you can do is to edit the information for the video and give it an “Album”. Try to ignore that part of you that thinks the notion of an album of video is stupid. If you want directories like TV Shows/Lost/Season 1, then too bad.

For a start, the icons in the XMB system are inexplicably different in style and tone. This is especially noticable when you have a theme on and almost all of the icons get restyled. The PSN icon especially looks completely different to everything else.

Music on the PS3. "How to save a life"? Really? Ok, whatever

Video media is particularly oddly handled in that there is sometimes an animated thumbnail and sometimes not. What is most inexplicable (or perhaps just least explicable) is that there is never video thumbnail from files downloaded from the PlayStation Store, official promotional videos, etc. But there is for random shit from the internet. Edward Penishands is better supported than Sony's own promotional trailers. How can this be? Even more bizarre is that many Bluray disks don't have any sort of icon beyond a disc icon. Admittedly the icon is blue (get it, bluray, the icon is blue?) but still, you'd think some sort of promo image would be in order for this most fancy of high definition next-generationality.

Continuing on multimedia and the PS3 continues to fail as a unit for music. The PS3 can't read the music on my M2 memory card because it's in the wrong directory. There have been no new visualisations added recently, leaving only three. One of which features the Earth very slowly becoming visible as the sun rises. Wow. Rocking. Will the next one have paint drying? Possibly a baby aging in real-time?

You can't search in any way for music, and the sorting options are hilariously limited. Music, like movies, can't be in directories.

On the hardware front the PS3 is rocking hard. The Hard Disk Drive in a PS3 is removable and replaceable, something Sony have failed spectacularly to capitalise on in their marketing. This means you can put a 500 gig drive in that sucker and load it up with porn, cartoons and pirated episodes of Dexter. That's a lot of space. You could fill it with every good R&B song and still have 500 gig left.

Yet for all this hardware capability there just isn't the interface to use it well. Want your episodes of Buffy in folders for seasons 1 – 7? Well, you can rename the album to Buffy Season 1. Sounds like a pretty reasonable compromise. Then you can just use the same album field (bodgy though that is) to group it by album. Except you can't. Well, you can, but you have to be really thrilled about the idea of writing the words “Buffy Season x” 144 times. There's no way to simply select one of the previous albums written.

I could rant on, and probably should, but you get my point. Sony have such good hardware and they need to improve their software to the same standard. Look at what consumers actually want to do with the machine, and optimise their fuckwit software to match their exceptional hardware. Especially in need of work is the multimedia aspect, an area in which they could be market leaders, but instead are merely frustrating and stupid.

Play TV
I recently purchased PlayTV and the experience has been mixed. Being able to record stuff is nice, and ditching a device (HD Digital Tuner) is always a plus. But typically of Sony the interface is completely different to the rest of the PS3's interface. It's a startling divergence from any concept of a unified aesthetic that makes it clear that not only are these components designed by different teams, but the teams actively dislike each other, and that since the "incident" of the Christmas Party 2007 the animosity has reached some critical levels.

Unlike the Vidzone team, the PlayTV department get along pretty well with the Bluray Remote group. They use the hardware well. They even give you a big sticker thing to put over the remote so you can see what the mappings do. Because that's what the BD Remote needs - to be bigger. But why, for the sake of all that is good and holy in this world, does the circle button...

Wait, here's a comprehensive list of what the circle button does in various official Sony interfaces.

Music: Quit playing
Playing DVD: Quit playing
Playstation Store: Quit store
Vidzone: Quit current Katy Perry video
Home: Jesus, like I know
Internet Browser: Quit browsing
Watching Bluray: Quit playing
Playing video clip: Quit playing
PlayTV: Sweet fuck all

It's not that SFA isn't an entirely reasonable option for one of the primary buttons in an interface. It's just that in terms of consistency maybe it should... you know... quit?

Still, PlayTV is actually a good interface. It really is. Because all it HAS is an interface, someone obviously had to justify their development budget by hiring an actual interface developer and putting some thought and planning into things.

PlayTV looking pretty much like PlayTV. What did you expect?

In fact, it's a good enough interface that it's recently started to be aped a bit by Vidzone.

And while we're talking about incompetent, bone headed failure in interface development seemingly developed to physically wound users, VidZone had to come up soon enough.

VidZone
VidZone is a newish service from Sony. The concept of VidZone is a good one. Making video clips easily accessible in good quality versions directly through the PS3's interface is a commendable goal. Unfortunately it's badly implemented and another perfect example of flawless interface design. It's hard to know where to start with VidZone. It's slow and clumsy, and it seems to avoid most of the basic principles of interface design.

Make no mistake, the ability to watch Beyonce clips at 3am while pausing and replaying with one hand should not be undervalued. Ditto Shakira. And Justin Beiber. What?

The main thing that was inexplicable was the fact that content was listed that wasn't there. For example, you would search for an artist and it would list them. But clicking on the name would show a message to let you know that the “Search returned no results”. It would list artists it didn't actually have any songs for.

Fuck you, Sony. This is interface design 101. If you're going to go to the first 100 interface design classes you should really go to that one too. They covered some really important stuff.

Interestingly a recentish update to VidZone fixed some of these idiocies, though some seem so obvious they shouldn’t have needed “fixing”. In particular, it took several months for Sony's own Bluray Remote to be supported. Still, solutions are important, and much needed. For example, artists wouldn't list if they had no tracks. Kudos. But interestingly they added some shiny new ones. For example, VidZone has always had playlists of recommended tracks. Usually these are themed. 80s, R&B Favourites, something like that. They'll throw maybe 15 songs in a list and then you can play that. It's a convenient way to get a general vibe going, fill some noise, etc.

Oh, you do like ALL of these songs chosen for arbitrary or business reasons by a major music label, right? Because if you don't, too bad. You can't skip.

Seriously. Can't skip. You can't go back. You can't go forward. You will listen, you will like it, and you will shut the hell up.

You know how I found out about this? They had a playlist called "Explicit Clips", with a picture of a hot chick on it. So yes, that seemed to match my interests.

It was only AFTER clicking on it that I found that it was explicit lyrics, not pictures, and that it should actually have been called "Godawful metal you cannot skip".

Honestly, I can't even conceive of the level of dick-faced douchebaggery required to come up with an interface that omits the basic options of a music/media player at the same time as locking you into a series of randomly selected tracks.

Playstation Store
Playstation's Store is... well, interesting. It's gone through a couple of revamps, and they've had good and bad points. But that's boring, it's the stuff that they royally screw up that's so frustrating and confusing. And sometimes it really can be confusing.

For example, in their "latest" section you might see an icon, an add-on for a game. You click on it for more info and get told "Tanarith's Venture Pack" "Join Taranith for more adventures in this latest add-on pack" That's great. FOR WHAT FUCKING GAME you useless....?! Seriously, is it that hard to put "Dragon Age Origins" somewhere under it instead of just making us guess what game you're making an add-on for?

The rest of the store is fairly adequate. It does little or nothing, gives you often very little of the game to go on (screenshots, or a video, or something are that hard?) but it more or less works.

Generic picture of the PlayStation Store to fill up space and make me look professional

Of course... when it doesn't work, it doesn't help, either.

You see, the PS3 has a number of errors that can occur. These could be anything from an inability to connect to you having insufficient funds. Naturally its mechanism for dealing with this is to give you some arcane error code, rather than translating it into human text that makes sense and helps users.

I want to point out that despite the tone it’s not that I’m an Xbox Fanboy. Quite the opposite. See the thing is I use my PS3 for almost everything now. All of my media, gaming, TV, DVDs, Bluray, etc, is on the PS3. So I've run across these problems BECAUSE I’m an enthusiastic supporter. But I don't use the 360 for nearly as much stuff. Basically just online games or reviewing stuff we happen to get as a 360 copy.

Maybe the grass is just as crap on that side of the fence as well?

The reason I write this article is simple – Sony can and should do better. The hardware is so damned good, and just a few small improvements to things like multimedia handling could really improve the overall utility of the system. Sony's hardware could be giving them a big edge.

Sony needs to consider a large undertaking to make their interfaces consistent and logical, but most of all, they need to realise as a company that it matters. They need to understand that it's not just about polygons or marketting spin, it's also about providing the best possible experience for their users.

They've spent a lot of money positioning themselves as a multimedia giant, and in part that's true. Maybe they should stop and take stock of what they're doing well and badly and consider consolidating their interfaces (PlayTV, VidZone, Playstation Store, MUBI, etc) into a more consistent form? In any case, one thing they definitely need to do is actually use it.

If they were to use the PS3 seriously as a media center (rather than just listing that on the box as a bullet point) then engineers or developers at Sony would realise just what a significant opportunity they're wasting by making the system as unworkable as it is. A proper multimedia system could be a feather in the cap of the console's capabilities, rather than an embarrassment. With Bluray functionality and PlayTV so well implemented Sony already has a solid lead on making their console the centrepiece of an entertainment system, but the console is capable of so much that they're not achieving.

I hope to see better from Sony, but given the years it's taken to get things up to "rubbish" I fear optimism may be unwarranted.