One thing which to me is synonymous with flying long distance is the back-of-the-seat screens, with their low resolution and strange implementation of GPS: a map of the world on which your huge plane flies and by which you can position yourself with seemingly random cities which appear with no apparent logic. Sometimes this view changes from a vertical map view to one on which you can see the horizon, and there are other screens which tell you the altitude, distance to destination, from departure and time of arrival. It doesn’t tell you the present time but it does tell you your cruising speed. It also swaps randomly between metric and imperial measures. it can’t fit all this information on one screen so it exchanges one figure for another, seemingly without scheme, so if you are interested in a particular bit of info you must just wait, patiently.
When I last saw this screen, about 2 years ago, it seemed to cry out for a touch interface — a subject which sprang easily to mind at the time because the new iPhone had just been announced (3G), and I had been designing an app. So I imagined that the map was touch sensitive, and how it might behave if it was.
When flying back from the US this past June I was pleasantly surprised to sit down and see embedded in the seat in front a much higher resolution screen controlled by touch! Exploring the console I found that along with the new interface comes a much wider selection of films than I’m used to, which is great. This passenger entertainment system gets full marks for content. The film part has many films, slightly oddly categorized – Nowhere Boy is under avante-garde films – but great to see a recent and non-mainstream film included.
The problem starts when you touch the screen to interact with it. Anyone who has used an iPhone, iPad or Android phone knows what touch should feel like. You put your finger here and the button responds… It feels natural. But not with this. It’s as if it has had it’s nerves removed, and it takes awhile to realise it has been touched. Numb, that’s what it is. And when you play a film the controls stay in place and the film is shown in a window which mast be half the area of the available screen. And it keeps showing an arrow cursor, which seems to suggest it doesn’t trust itself to respond, and has to have a legacy pointer which might be meant to make it feel familiar but ends up looking apologetic or slack and feeling somewhat confusing….” you mean there’s a mouse here somehwere?”
So I explored some more, pressed a button and tapped another. Pressed again when nothing happened only to be given the message “ASXi application is currently unavailable” hmmm, now I feel utterly frustrated and confused. I never asked for an ASXi application, and I would like to see a map please. At this rate I’m going to want my old friend the untouchable map with it’s accompaniment of unfathomable figures back.
But there is one more area to explore and that is audio. Again I am faced with a sluggish interface wrapped around a reasonable selection of content. Sluggish isn’t all, this UI appears to have all the things you expect in an audio player, but suffers from meaningless flourishes and detail: selected song takes on an ugly sharp edged drop shadow and a weird tick and plus sign. Note to designer: Make your mind up! I had to ask the stewarddess what the USB port next to the screen is for: “so you can play your music from your iPod through the system” came the reply. No there’s an idea: take the audio from a device with good sound quality and a stunningly intuitive and responsive interface and play it through some really awful ear-buds, using a slow-moving dog of an interface. I think not.
I’m sure they could do so much better. With the iPad in the world putting great touch-driven experience into the hands of ordinary folks, surely the level of user-experience must rise and the attention to user-interface detail improve. We’ll see how things turn out. The flight confirmed for me that not all touch is equal.
For now it turns out that the old screen with the map and the info about altitude, windspeed, distance and time, all spewed out in a somewhat random way with absolutely no control available to the viewer – is something I miss. That type of content isn’t available on this system ‘cos ASXi isn’t playing ball, and for all the rest I have my iPad.