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Userfriendlyness and the Director DVD-Video asset |
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Tuesday, 28 March 2006 |
Today the Atlas Building on Carnotstraat in Antwerp opened. The building will house a number of public services that focus on integration of immigrants.
My company (Atomik Studios) did the kiosk applications that run in the lobby. One application is a interactive city map with all kinds of statistics.
In the second kiosk application we had to integrate 2 DVD-Videos, one we created and an older one. We built this app in Macromedia Director and integrated the DVD-videos, using the new DVD-video cast member (new since Director MX 2004). We put both DVD-video files on the hard disk and used the member("dvd").folder property to switch between the two DVDs.
This seemed to work fine at first but there are a number of problems, not in Director, not in the DVD-Video, but in the difference in usage and user expectations.
The first problem is that a button in a DVD-Video menu must be selected (hilited) first and then the user must hit the OK button on his remote control to actually go to the selected chapter. The DVD-VIdeo was created using Apple DVD Studio Pro. Appearantly the user interaction depends on how you create your menu buttons. Layered buttons require a doubleclick (the first click to hilite the second to acknowledge), while shaped buttons require a single click because that are activated on rollover. So our main menu required a doubleclick and the submenus and Director buttons required a single click.
The other problem is the difference between the title and the root menu. While this may be clear on a DVD remote control, it is not in a kiosk application. This wouldn't be much of a problem, but Director doesn't give you a (direct) way to detect which menu the user is in. So we had two Director buttons, one to go to the title menu and one to go to the root menu. Users don't know (and don't have to know) what the difference is, so the tried both buttons. On top of that, if you hit the root menu button while you're in the root menu already, you get a black screen. Since users thought they had to doubleclick each button, they doubleclicked the Director buttons too, resulting in a black screen.
So while the politicians were still speaching, we rushed to the office, to encode the DVDs in mp4 format and build the DVD menus in Director.
 The Atlas Building
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