Kinect Banking App – What not to build

It takes a lot of courage for a newbie to the field of NUI such as myself to make as bold a statement as I’m about to, but I will.

This really isn’t what you should use the Kinect for.

Okay, there’s fun things out there for the Kinect (like making yourself invisible) but there’s not a lot of things out there dedicated to making mundane chores seem effortless. We’ve got your “Xbox Play” commands, but that’s about it.

But should something like banking ever become ‘effortless’? Well, watch that video and I hope it will become clear that it really isn’t.

UI designers will probably tell you that getting users to do the same action again and again becomes jarring. Same goes with Kinect. The woman swiping through currencies? Yeah, bad times. Every hand movement related to one movement of the wheel. Having to do that four times just to get to her Majesty’s finest currency is three too many.

Ideally, long menus should have inertia or a weak form of friction acting on it. So the faster you swipe, the further through the menu you go before it stops. It’s more effort = more gain.

Although there is an element of it that I was pleasantly surprised with. Gestures. Opening your hands from being together opens that menu item, and the opposite closed it. You’re diving in and out of menus. It’s simple, but effective, right? They also apply in all situations, not just the main menu or within a certain context, so there’s no need to learn a tonne of silly, meaningless gestures.

There’s the bit with the dog selecting things on screen which just makes me scared for my bank balance, but we won’t go into that.

All in all, even if it is just a proof of concept or a little bit of fun, it’s a good learning experience for me at least. What not to aim for. Although I might take that diving metaphor into my own work. Maybe.