A lot of positive press has been published about the new Nintendo Wii console and here in Australian it seems widely regarded that it is beating the Xbox in weekly sales volumes.

From my own personal point of view, I was motivated to purchase a Wii due only to the new controls and simple curiosity that I wanted to experience them. The Wii controls have a lot of new features and/or use cases and I will assume that the readers are familiar with these new features and therefore will not go into detail on them here.  

My experiences of opening of the product:-

• When you first open the box, the height of the box consists of two compartments that act like draws that can be slid out. A very elegant approach that doesn’t require the entire contents to be tipped out and instead allows the user to lay the contents out in front of them on the floor, still in the draws.  
• The cables are neatly tied with thin metal ties which is fairly standard, however the tied cables are contained within a plastic bag that is then tied again using a second metal tie. I am not quite sure of the purpose of this, aside from perhaps a small gain in the ‘neat’ appearance when the user first views the contents of the draws.
• The three connectors at the rear of the Wii are all different sizes and have set orientations that only allow them to be inserted in one way.

The cable connection is a snap and is working with my TV with no problems at all.  

The new controllers have new use cases that would be completely new to almost all users, the Wii engineers therefore needed to design the software in such a way so as to educate the user on how to interact with the Wii using these new controllers.

My experience with how the Wii system goes about educating new users:-   

• The sports games that come free with the Wii console are essentially training drills. The movements required are very simple and the lessons are short, typically less than 3 minutes. After playing these games for perhaps only a hour or two the user can then move up in his skill level and therefore begin to enjoy the more sophisticated games available on the Wii.

• Essentially a user's experience is directly proportional to their skill level with regards to how they control the Wii using the new controllers. Therefore the Wii engineers directly go about leading a user up the learning curve through a series of interactive games that have the user ‘doing’ rather than reading a manual and trying to memorize a set of combinations. Creating such an experience for a user is however very tough, but I think the Wii engineers have done a great job.     

I think there are a lot of design tips that can be collected from the Wii system , more of which I will discuss in the future.