Nerd Acumen

Shelley Armstrong, Interaction Design Manager at the Microsoft Design Center, spoke to my fellow students and I last week in our interaction design class.  She talked about the process of designing the look, the packaging and the “overall cohesive aesthetic” of the Xbox 360 (see Microsoft design center – our people for more).  She detailed the process of defining your problem (such as, make everything relative to Xbox’s design completely cohesive) and then the cyclical process of designing, prototyping, and evaluating a product until you can finalize it.  It was interesting to hear her story of taking on huge tasks from humble beginnings, where she began designing the dash for Xbox by herself to eventually growing and leading a major team through two console launches.

Armstrong worked on guiding the Xbox brand’s design through the entire production process to maintain uniformity.  Some of the insights that were shared by Armstrong with the class about her approach to even the most finite details of the Xbox packaging, even, are applicable to John Maeda’s ten laws of simplicity.  (If you’re not familiar with Maeda’s work out of MIT, please visit the Laws of Simplicity website.)  Armstrong, for example, spoke about dealing with the preponderance of warning text that would be found on plastic wrapping inside packaging, which results from having to duplicate choke hazard messages in multiple languages.  This was the initial result of choosing a certain type of font, in fact, which actually increased the amount of material that would have to be printed.  Here, in her attempt to follow law 2, or organize (in this case, keeping everything together with a common typography), she learned from law 9 it seems, failure – some things can never be made simple (or, to stretch, let’s say simpler here, in that it would be simpler to keep everything uniform to one type of font, in an ideal world).

Armstrong also spoke about how designing for one space is not the same as designing for another.  Here I will talk about how the brand design presents itself in two areas to illustrate this point.  Although both the Xbox website, available in web browsers of course, and the Xbox Live experience only available on the Xbox console are both navigable, thus lending themselves to what I thought would be similar designs, it turns out that the needs and uses of both spaces were different, and the design is not that similar.  Web users are looking for certain information, whereas the console has a contained environment that allows the user a different navigation experience to access the content they are looking for.  Nonetheless, the design aesthetic remains constant.  The brand is king as will be shown below.

For further illustration, just compare the Xbox Live website to the Xbox Live console experience:

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/live … hit that link for the first look, then take a look at this screenshot of the console:

While both look very different, both have a uniform aesthetic in colors, typography, and iconography.  They exhibit a cohesive look in keeping with the Xbox brand.

Enter Playstation 3.  The PS3 is another robust brand that offers a console network experience and a web presence basically the same way Xbox does.  However, PS3 isn’t maintaining its aesthetic between their web presence and what is known as the Playstation Network on their console (specifically some of its components, not all, so in this case, the Playstation Store is referred to, comparable to Xbox Live’s Marketplace in many ways).  This represents a significant divergence from Xbox’s brand model which remains cohesive from screen to screen.  See below:

http://www.us.playstation.com/PS3 …for the web presence, which is very black in tone, and the…

… Playstation Store, which diverges from the color schematic.

I think what has made both the Xbox and the Playstation 3 successful in terms of branding in each camp, at least in general (according to my personal observations) in their television and other marketing, both brands, is that they both keep the brands’ colors and other aesthetic elements generally uniform between different spaces in which the brands each separatly exist.  However, one can see that there is apparently more of a need on Sony’s part to keep the Playstation web presence separate in look and feel from the console-based Playstation Network, which takes a stylistic turn when you get to the store, for instance.  This would lead one to lean in favor of the Xbox 360 as a more successfully designed brand than the Playstation 3 moniker.

References:

Microsoft design center – our people. Retrieved 10/23/2008, 2008, from http://www.microsoft.com/design/People/Detail.aspx?key=shelley