Jacob__3__Q
I thought it was interesting that Saffer introduced rhythm as one of the elements of interaction design. As a musician I've noticed several designs whose responses were very rhythmic - e.g. there exists a definite time it takes to complete a "feedback" (or perhaps even the time it takes to complete a "feedforward") on any member of a set of similar objects within some designed system.
Dr. Dailey noted the "genie" effect that the Mac OS X employs through Quartz to "minimize" and "maximize" windows. That time is always the same (unless you hold certain keys to change it) for every window you "minimize."
Similarly, when one clicks on an icon on the dock and the application doesn't open immediately, the icon bounces up and down rhythmically to let the user know "Hey, I'm working on opening this up for you." While each bounce is rhythmically timed, each bounce may have no indication of how much of the program is loaded; yet, this might make the user feel as though the computer is processing the load in an ordered manner, as opposed to some loading bar which may suddenly jump a little and then wait to progress for a good deal of time.
Here is a site whose menu responses are quick, but because each response is timed, one can have fun just messing around with the menu. (Notice that large menus pop up with the same time that the smaller menus do):
The big question:
Do you think rhythm is appropriately used in most interaction design on the Web?
Labels: Jacob Barnard
posted by Jacob Barnard @ 9:27 AM
4 comments
4 Comments:
I don't think designers for website bother with rhythm too much, because people have varying internet speeds that can cause load-times to behave unpredictably. That's more for content-driven sites though. I think flash designers can implement rhythm because they can make all the content in the library load before the site even displays.
I agree with Kirk. Most websites aren't designed with too much rhythm in mind for the reasons he mentioned. I think you'll find that rhythm is mostly implemented in flash games more than anything else. Especially in games that are rhythm based (obviously) or depend on the timing of your mouse movements and clicks.
To be realistic, I think most of the flash based websites use rhythm well, which in this case I think most of them use nice menu show/hide effect in them. I personally think the use of rhythm can be a little bit irritating and less productive if designers use it too often in their products. Rhythm is fun, but takes time to get what you want done, so I think designers should limit the use of rhythm to entertainment or product appealing places only. I noticed about it the first time when I found out how to stop Windows “Start” button from taking its own time to display each menus inside it, and I liked it much better when the menus showed up immediately after I hover over each one of them.
I think that most websites DO have rhythm. When we create buttons that look similar, or keep the same color scheme between different pages, the repetition of these aspects creates a rhythm.
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