First Impressions - Nintendo Labo

We were lucky enough to get our hands on the new Nintendo Labo Toy-Con 01 kit. It's been a fun experience putting together the cardboard experiments and playing with them, but I was surprised at how charmed I was by the experience design. So I'm here to spill some thoughts on a few of those key microinteractions I found pleasant.

Out of the box. I cracked this thing open and I was 12 again.

Joy-Con Color Recognition

The Nintendo Switch does a great job of continuing this device variation recognition trend that Apple has more or less made famous. I still remember the moment when I got my first iPod video and plugged it in. The icon that showed up in my Windows Explorer was for the black iPod video, the same one that I'd bought. Not a generic music player or iPod icon, but the device that was mine. Later, when the multicolored iPod nanos would be released, plugging them into the computer would yield the same result. The color of the icon matched the device you bought.

Sorry, back to Nintendo. When you connect your Joy-Cons to the console and launch Labo, it displays your two Joy-Cons on the screen next to the cardboard. When it came time to slot my Joy-Con's into the bug-car we built, it recognized the colors of my Joy-Cons, and instructed me to slot my red Joy-Con into the left slot, and the neon yellow Joy-Con into the right slot. This is a little thing that makes a big difference, especially if you're a kid. It's much easier to tell a red Joy-Con from a blue one than it is to tell a left Joy-Con from a right one, at a glance.

Let Go to Pause?

Nintendo came up with a dead simple yet very unique take on the video player pause/play paradigm.

Imagine literally any video player you've used. How do you pause it? There's usually some sort of pause button, right? Maybe you click or tap the main video screen? How do you play it again? Usually the same button/part of the screen.

Nintendo recognized that the Labo instructional videos occupied a very distinctive use case. Users would follow the instructional video to assemble the Labo. So it had to be as good at that as possible. If you've ever followed a video tutorial of any kind on YouTube, you'll know the feeling of pausing every five seconds to replicate what's going on in the video and check your work to make sure it matches what's in the video. Nintendo got around this with a dead simple fix. Hold your finger to the screen to make the video play. Release your finger to pause. Nintendo figured out that you're never going to be watching it while your hand's not on the damn thing, and that while your hands aren't on the screen (and are, thus, on the cardboard), that the most helpful thing the screen can do is stop moving and be a perfect guide to that particular step you're on. When the 'video' is 'paused', it just sits there and highlights the component that you've stopped on, subtly animating it doing its thing.

Intuitive 'Video' Controls

Another of Labo's affordance triumphs lies in the dead simple pan/rotate/zoom system that Nintendo has built. It took the standard smartphone pinch-to-zoom and added the one-finger to pan and two fingers to rotate, making it relatively easy for any kid with iPad experience (let's face it.. nearly every kid these days) to navigate this brave new world with zero-learning-curve ease.

Conclusion

That's all I have for now. Thanks for reading. I'd love to wrap up my thoughts on the Labo again once I've gotten more time to tinker with it.