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Avoiding The Uncanny Valley of User Interface

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Re: Avoiding The Uncanny Valley of User Interface

#22

Post by mleonhard »

patio11 wrote: post #8

The part about web apps -- meh. The part about gobsmackingly good imitation human animation: cool. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLiX5d3rC6o&fmt=18 Two years from now we'll be seeing that, or not seeing it as the case may be, in movies. Another two years after that it will be in the AAA video games with 9 figure budgets. And another two years after that you'll be able to do it from a Japanese cell phone. God I love…

That video creeped me out a bit. :o

Re: Avoiding The Uncanny Valley of User Interface

#23

Post by gb »

mleonhard wrote: post #21

Maybe this explains why I hate using OpenOffice and other copy-cat software?

Office already had a pretty poor interface, so maybe it's more to do with that?

I was pretty disappointed they didn't try anything different, but I guess the aim of that was to attract people who actually like Office in the first place.

Re: Avoiding The Uncanny Valley of User Interface

#25

Post by stcredzero »

lbrandy wrote: post #6
swombat wrote: post #2

Hmm, another exaggeration from Jeff Atwood. He's getting good at these. In my experience the metaphor doesn't stretch to RIAs. My start-up's main application is precisely one of those "RIA that pretends to behave like a desktop app", and thanks to Flex we've been able to get a good enough approximation. Result? Our users don't feel uncomfortable about it (although we have had the odd user who seemed to expect that ev…

Sure it's an exaggeration. The uncanny valley is a visceral biological reaction in parts of our brains that have spent millions of years become very finely tuned to identifying human beings. We have no such location for user interface. That said, I think there is still something to be said for the concept. If you are trying to mimic something, and get it 99% of the way there, that last 1% _can_ be source of frustrati…

So basically, Jeff's just saying, "If you look like X, you've just set all the expectations of expectations X. You'd better meet them. Oh, and BTW it's just like this other concept that got on the front page of reddit!"
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