Harmonix is on a roll lately, recently releasing the excellent Rock Band 3 across multiple platforms and Dance Central for Kinect on Xbox 360. I'll just go ahead and shamelessly link back to this post about Rock Band's user interface, and I also wanted to link to this post on Ars Technica about how Harmonix designed the menus in Dance Central. As someone with an interest in human computer interaction and user interface design, I find this kind of stuff really interesting. I haven't picked up the Kinect, and don't plan to any time soon, but the changes Microsoft made to the Xbox 360's Dashboard software to accommodate navigating by voice and "touch" are interesting. I'd like to try Kinect out for a few days just to get a feel for the choices they made and the issues they attempted to overcome. For giggles, I read the Windows Phone 7 UI Design and Interaction guide, and while it felt like a bizarre religious document at times, it's interesting to see justifications for why the user interface on those new phones behaves the way it does.
Just some light reading for your Wednesday.
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