Innovative User Experience for Video Scrubbing

There are a couple of user-experience design principles that apply to so many of the Rich Internet Applications that we develop:

• Content over Chrome
• Direct Manipulation

When we speak about content over chrome, it is a reminder that the chrome of the application - the menus, the toolbars, the scrollbars, trees, etc - shouldn't be allowed to suffocate and overwhelm the content that the user wishes to engage with.  The principle of direct manipulation often fits hand in glove with content over chrome; direct manipulation reminds us that rather than users using buttons, controls, menubars and sliders as proxies with which to manipulate or control content, we can look for interaction metaphors that allow the user to engage directly with the content itself.  Think of being able to drag an album cover into the checkout in order to make a purchase, as a discoverable way of directly manipulating the content, over selecting the album, and then having to select a "buy" button somewhere else.

But I digress; I just found over on techcrunch a tremendous example of these 2 UX principles being applied to the process of scrubbing through a video - forward- and re-winding through the video content.  In the DiMP player, the traditional "timeline as a scrub tool" with which we navigate video, has been replaced with a discoverable, yet very intuitive gesture-based approach to engaging with the video itself. 

Just take a look at this video here to see what I mean.

I think one of the other reasons that this gesture-based navigation resonates with me so much, is how much it encapsulates the philosophy of "building great experiences on both sides of the glass" which I've used in a few earlier blog posts, to describe how more useful, usable and desirable user-experiences can sit atop and hide the complexity of complex business processes through more intuitive interactions.  For me, this is the role of technology - to simply not complicate, to create ever more natural and powerful ways of engaging with ideas and information. 

Now take a look at this video and begin to get a glimpse of the complexity within the algorithms that are realising this functionality.  For most end-users, the genius and complexity will never surface to them - abstracted with the veneer of an intuitive interaction (arguably - once it has been discovered and learned) model.  What the video recorder wasn't, but the Tivo was.

If you want to get this working on Flash Player 10, then start with the whitepaper here.  Good luck, let me know when you have it figured out.