Hands on with Facemakr for iPhone
Developer Hawken King sent along an e-mail this morning about his new Facemakr application. After watching the video, which I've included here, I decided to give the software a try. Facemakr, which is featured in the App Store as a Social Networking tool, lets you create custom avatars using an interactive face editor (which sounds like high-risk surgery).
The reason this caught my eye and made me want to give it a spin had nothing to do with social networking, however. My kids spend hours and hours creating Miis on our Wii gaming system. It seemed to me that Facemakr might offer the same sort of creative engagement.
So did it?
The problem with Facemakr is that whoever put this app together seems to have tested it on a simulator, using mouse input rather than on an actual iPhone and a big old screen to work with. As a rule of thumb, buttons should never be smaller than 44-by-44 pixels. The buttons in Facemakr are tiny. A single real-world fingertip easily covers three button choices.
The second problem is that the icon design is weak. When you use icons rather than words, the picture really need to be able to express themselves the first time they're used, not the fifth, tenth, or hundred time after you learn what they mean. It's all about recognition (a good thing) versus recall (a bad thing, forcing users to learn your system because your icons don't work). Facemakr really needs better pictures (not to mention larger ones) because the beard icon looks like lips, the lips icon looks like an eye, the glasses icon looks like the letters "bd", and the hair icon — well, a half circle really doesn't scream out "hair" at first glance.
Facemakr has a good idea. I really love the concept behind it but I wish the execution lived up to that concept. It needs to be redesigned and, hopefully, upscaled to the iPad where the complex interface has a chance of matching real world physical human interaction limits, specifically finger sizes.
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