I’ve always been a ‘how do things work’ kind of guy. I like poking and prodding at systems, disassembling things and trying to understand why they are designed the way they are. More recently I have been reading things like Jakob Neilsen’s site and the Design Of Everyday Things.
In the last week or so I have been playing Red Alert 3 with my girlfriend, going through the coop campaign, which, annoyingly, you have to use their servers to do. You can play skirmishes on a LAN, but no coop. Hmm.
That in itself is not a huge problem, we have fast internet through the cable company and I am sure EA games can take the traffic. But, the interface sucks.
One big annoyance is that some actions are performed asynchronously, including logging in and out. Clicking the logout button greys it out, but does not change the rest of the interface. You can still post chat messages and probably even invite people for games while the system is logging you off.
Working with javascript alot, I know that doing things async can make a lot of sense in places. But, the behavior that RA3 has bothers me because the only feedback I get is the disabling of the button. I feel like it should take you back to the login screen, but it doesn’t show that until the logout callback has finished. I find that aggravating when something is not working properly and I am trying to log out and log back in to see if reseting my session fixes it.
Gah.
