Digital Design Blog

Enter the Zooming User Interface (ZUI): Spatial Expirements On Rise

The ZUI, or zooming user interface, seems to be on the rise as websites with 3D aspects to them proliferate. ZUIs fundamentally change the feel of a site: sometimes with great affect, other times with mixed results.

WHITEvoid, a firm that creates interactive installations and draws from the disciplines of interaction design, product design and interior architecture among other things, has a site with a 3D navigation paradigm and an option to go full screen. The site feels like a filing cabinet, with drawers that pull out and documents that fly towards and away from you sequentially.

Schematic, an interactive agency, has developed a corporate site that had me flashing back to undergraduate days in the library wrangling with the microfiche. As I moved through the site by clicking and dragging, my finger hit the scroll wheel on my mouse to see if I could zoom that way too. You can’t: the zoom controls text scrolling but I would have been pleasantly surprised if you could zoom a la Google Maps.

The Hard Rock Cafe memorabilia collection, however, does utilize the scroll wheel to get visitors up close and personal with James Brown’s velour shirt and the handwritten lyrics to ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’. It’s an interesting way to view the collection. It feels like you’re wandering past a huge wall covered in artifacts and every now and then you peer in for a closer look.

These sites raise a few interesting questions:

• What behaviors do you apply to which input devices? How do you make it clear that the scroll wheel up and down as well as back and forth, or don’t you have to?
• Are there other interaction elements that partner well with zooming, and some that make it feel overwhelming? The interaction audit metrics, introduced at the IA Sumit 2008, might extend to include 3D interactions.
• Is there a specific emotional response elicited from the visitor by using this design technique? Do they all meet with a sense of delight?
• What other real world metaphors make the most sense in the digital 3D space? When is a filing cabinet more appropriate than a wall or a microfiche?

The outcome of these design experiments will no doubt emerge as design patterns, to help apply these techniques from video game design and gestural interfaces.