Cognitive Labs

As mentioned earlier, Hulu is a service being offered by NBC-Universal and Fox and creates a high-quality, content focused service with a high-touch, empathetic user experience.

Two thumbs up on the user interface which is simple, but elegant.



Using it to watch the David Lynch film Mulholland Drive which rates only about an "8" on the weird scale, if "10" might be considered highly disturbing, hulu offered the ability to reduce side panel illumination, for example, if it is dark, and a very easy pause and play function. The sound also is high quality mp3 (not sure of the bit rate), a nice upgrade compared with some UGC sites, which feature mono mp3 encoding on their Flash players.

You can also add hulu content on your site, which distinguishes its approach from some of the content creators. Ads are placed in a thin banner on the upper right border above the player and sequenced in the content itself periodically, or, you can elect to watch a trailer of an upcoming film distributed by the partners in hulu and enjoy a completely ad-free experience.

Nice.

Labels: encoding, Flash, fox, hulu, lynch, mulholland, nbcuniversal

The executive function exercise of decision-making speed is one of the best holistic regimens for overall brain fitness: sensitive to changes in response time, choice, and also cognitive "load" placed on the frontal lobe and amygdala. The associated multi-tasking replicates a computational scenario of excess simultaneous users. Please assess a proposed new design sketch...

Labels: actionscript, brain, executive_function, Flash, skins

Sometimes we get asked interesting questions. "Why do you have this or that game, why do you have a 'different' log-in process, etc., etc?"

This site has been an experiment in simplicity, among other things, including scientifically validated games and tests.

We thought that people would be more likely to sign-up if everything was at least 50% easier than the usual site. So it is. You just have to log-in with a quick one step process, which also puts you in touch with us for as long as you have your email address.

Simple design leads to other advantages as well - a more organic following. We're not to the extreme of let's say Jakob Nielsen, who argued that Flash be banned for several years, nor are we desperate for the latest Ajax style trends, some of which complicate the interface with superfluous motion and activity and require doubleclicking rather than single clicking.

The idea is to achieve a harmonious balance between elements that contribute to a simple but useful experience. As a result, there is an increasing returns trend with sign-ups, where we are probably 3X-5X more effective than 'standard' sites and may be less plagued by bot sign-ups that can easily (and do) defeat capchas - the squiggly letters and numbers that you are often asked to enter. A case study is the discussion board, where a standard log-in process (with capcha) is in effect.A simple, in-line system (as featured on 99% of the site) defeats the registration bots, as nonconforming registrations are simply deleted. This, explains the information approach. The simpler the better.

Labels: 3X, Ajax, capchas, Flash, nielsen, registration, simple, simplicity

The hungry Mickey Mouse gobbled up a penguin recently. That is, Disney acquired Club Penguin - which is basically a Flash game (albeit complex and multiplayer) for $350 million with another $350 million in perfomance guarantees for a total consideration of about $700 million - which is $120 million more than MySpace went for.

There's an arcade inside the game where the penguins can play old-time arcade favorites (actual games embedded swf files inside the swf file.

Not just any game, Club Penguin had grown to about 12 million registered users with a smaller number of paying subscribers.

Labels: club_penguin, Flash

There were two major stories in technology over the weekend, for those interested in this topic. The first is Google's acquisition of DoubleClick on Friday, and the second, Microsoft's announcement of Silverlight, a vector authoring tool designed to compete with Adobe. Since Flash is installed on up to 99% of the total available market (TAM) for browsers, it will be interesting to see what their strategy is.

Labels: adobe, doubleclick, Flash, Google, microsoft, silverlight

We just noticed that the Stephen Hawking test and Hal9000 'game' had gone somewhat quiet, that was due to a directory path change that happened without our volition on the servers - that has been rectified so that those assets are properly called within the application.

Much better.

Hal 9000
Stephen Hawking talk

Labels: Flash, hal9000, haldron, hawking, heuristic

It's about time for a refresh and some new functionality in our testing, to wit:



and also, we are beginning to modify the scoreboard portion so it is less nomenclature-driven. Can't say we are there yet, but getting closer...

Labels: design, Flash, newlook, nomenclature, refresh, score, test