Weighing Machine by a Videogame Company

There has been a visible shift towards design on Beta Thoughts in the past few months. If you are one of the 1.5 readers of this blog you might have noticed it. While I have always been interested in the design of things – but only after the google reader’s recommendation engine recommended “core77’s design blog” that this interest has gone into over drive. Besides my work as a NetWeaver professional revolves around thinking from user’s perspective aka user centric design. So what all of this has to do with the title of this post? Read on…

Core77’s recent post pointed to a lengthy but immensely enjoyable article about the design and development of Wii Fit which might have over taken Grand Theft Auto sales by  now. Don’t miss reading the complete article for some of the craziest places there ideas come from. Over here I would just point out to how important the user centric design is for them

Miyamoto-san banged the table and said, “That’s wrong!” He told this person that from the consumer’s point-of-view, clarity was important. That people don’t say, “You need to lose 2 BMI points to reach your ideal weight”, they say, “You need to lose 3 pounds to reach your ideal weight”. We wanted people from age 5 to 95 to enjoy using Wii and he pointed out that most of those people wouldn’t know what BMI is. He demanded to know how this person could be so backward-looking when so many employees were working so hard to negotiate with official organizations to allow kilograms to be displayed in the game for the benefit of the consumers.

Image Courtesy – Goodrob13’s photostream at flickr