Ruth Nichols has written a M.Sc. thesis on skins, “A study into the Useful Application of Skins for Information Filtering” (Computer and Software, McMaster University, 2003). She has brought out an interesting area of user interface design and theory that is connected with the work done on Mods in the gaming community – namely Skins.
She writes that “The original idea of skins was developed by Winamp, an MP3 player build by a small company Nullsoft. Winamp was first released in 1997.” (p. 20) Winamp was officialy released in 1998 and was bought by AOL in 1999. Skinning was added in 1998.
Some questions to consider:
1. The aesthetic dimension of skins – they allow users to not only make their applications more functional, but also to decorate them to suit their visual taste. What is the relationship between function and visual look? Is there a clean division?
How can we do user testing in an area where aesthetics plays a significant role?
2. Skins introduces a distinction between types of users. There are users who just just use the default skin. There are users that choose among available skins. There are user who create skins. One of the things that makes skin research so exciting is that there is a culture of exchange between skin designers and users, including the rating of skins. The application and its functionality almost becomes unimportant.
If it is important to the success of a skin solution to have a culture of trading and exchanging skins – what can developers do to assist the development of such a culture?
How can we study such an exchange culture?
What are some of the intellectual property issues that come from having part of an application dependent on amateur designers?
3. What does a programmer sacrifice if they separate form and content by developing a skinable interface? What is the cost to development? Are there no costs to the users?
4. A skinnable interface is substantially easier to use. Is the problem not pushed back one step – now users have to learn to use a skinning tool like an XML language and a XUL building tool? In addition they need to understand the interface possibilities in order to develop new skins.
5. How are skins connected to mods? Skins is used not for game character modifications. Is it not all part of a common issue?
Some interesting references:
The Skins Factory. A company that specializes in developing skins.
XUL Planet would seem to be a site devoted to XUL – the Mozilla user interface language.
Winamp Skinning Page is where you can get information about how to develop skins for Winamp.
R. Took. Surface interaction: A paradigm and model for separating application
and interface. CHI ’90 Proceedings, 1990.