Dan Paul Smith

This is what will hopefully be the first in many posts on a particular evolving interface - an interface that people use, offline or online. I'm not quite sure what I aim to be talking about, but they'll basically be to express my thoughts and share my observations on what I think are interesting interfaces.

FOOTBALL MANAGER

I've never played Football Manager, but I have a number of friends that do - some of them being almost computer illiterate. But after a friend posted a work-in-progress screenshot of the Football Manager 2012 interface, I realised that each of them become accustomed to a certain interface for a year - and they *use* this interface like no other - the speed they click buttons at is depressing. This is an addictive game and players will reluctantly admit it's a part of their life - I've experienced the same with another game - the situation you find yourself in as a result of the addiction can leave you questioning yourself, your worth and being for a decade. I'll probably save this for another post.

Aside from the interfaces, Football Manager is an interesting game to talk about - specifically how game events map to real life events, and how the game developers have it's 'story board' written for them every year for free by the football sector.

A note worth adding about my analysis of the Football Manager interfaces; I've never played the game and don't have an understanding of the game dynamics - so my thoughts will be strictly limited to visual and spacial observations regarding to how information is designed and conveyed - so this is more for the design and user experience lot, this is not in any way a preview of the game.

So the first thing to say about FM is that it's got one serious interface - it's a data cockpit. The latest interface of the new edition of the game, "FM 2012" - is the result of tweaking an interface for seven years with an enormous amount of money and hard work put behind it. It's impressive.

So let's go back to 2005, when I was 17 - and very much into gaming. Unfortunately for Sega, I had already been won over by a different game by that time and so Football Manager never found it's way into my life.

2005

2005 feels similar to a phase I went through when I first got the hang of basic web development styles (or Cascading Style Sheets - CSS). As soon as you're able to round the corners of boxes, add drop shadows and add gradients - you tend to apply one or more of these styles to nearly every element on the screen - just because you can.