GOOD BAD DESIGN

Good or Bad:

Booking tickets for two people. Seating options are:

Oh please. Sometimes people like to sit opposite one another.

“Your first stop for train tickets”. Last resort.

Good or Bad:

New-ish, rubbish bottle design. Did anyone actually use this before it went to manufacturing?

Always the same story – shampoo everywhere.

Been a while.

I’ve realised that the site should really be extremely one-dimensional. Like/dislike. Picture perhaps. Sentence or two. So that’s the plan.

Good or Bad:

While the rest of the known universe talks about the iPad, naturally I decide to cover the Support & Downloads page on the Nikon Europe website.

My father was given a digital camera for Christmas this year. Using screen sharing over Skype (very good btw), we plugged it in, got iPhoto going (perfect for my father if not for everyone else), imported, printed and emailed.

But during all this I wanted to have a look at the manual. See what he was seeing. So naturally I went to get it from the Nikon website. And got this:

You probably can’t see too much detail with that image. It’s the text in the grey box on the bottom right that we’re interested in:

I simply do not understand this. What copyright infringement? What are they trying to control here? I understand that Nikon want to try to get every owner of a Nikon product to hand over their personal details but barriers like this are simply that – barriers to a continued dialogue with their consumers.

This makes Nikon look nervous.

Good or Bad:

Microsoft recently reported worldside sales of 39M for the Xbox 360. PS3 pre-Christmas figures were around 23M and the Wii is in excess of 50M. That’s over 110M consoles sold worldwide.

Nintendo DS sales in the UK have passed the 10M mark. Nintendo reckon 1 in 6 people own one. Throwaway anecdotal evidence suggest that this may well be true. I have one. My niece and nephew have one each. My mother has one.

On the PC, World of Warcraft now has over 14M subscribers. That’s equivalent to the population of Portugal or Greece or Guatemala all playing just one game.

And then there’s Casual Gaming as well. EA CEO John Riccitiello guessed at there being 1 billion active gamers in the world today. If you look at Gimme Friction Baby you can see why this number might actually be right. And why it’s going to keep getting larger.

It’s extremely simple and playing it makes more sense than me trying to describe it. It contains all the pleasures of puzzlers like Tetris and Puzzle Bobble but without the speed up making it a touch more sedate and contemplative. The control system is extremely easy and accurate. Simple graphics mean that you concentrate on the job at hand and collision detection is flawless.

It’s totally non-threatening and extremely welcoming with a gentle learning curve. A cerebral, interactive way to while away an awfully long time.

More anecdotal non-data alert. I introduced this to my brother, mother, niece, nephew, father and girlfriend and all of them enjoyed playing. Now we’re a family who like to play games but we all have individual tastes and competencies. This was an excellent leveller.

Casual Games are massive and will grow and grow until they are indivisible from our other entertainment channels. Gimme Friction Baby shows you why.

And Happy New Year.