What's wrong with Chinese designers?

xaveri · **Posted:** Sat Feb 02, 2008 3:43 am

I've seen during the past months many videos from many players here in mp4nation and in other web pages and a general opinion is forming in my mind about the graphics designers that create the interfaces of these players...for the most part they suck!

What is wrong with these designers? I mean, I can understand how one company may create a bad interfaces with horrible looking graphics but how come most of them look like this? Are there no good Chinese graphical designers? The rule seems to be horrible fonts, bad taste in colors, rough edged images and lack of innovation in general. With a weeks worth of dedicated work I can take a GUI and change it completely so its not a matter of cost. And don’t tell me that the firmware comes like that and the companies that manufacture the equipment do not create the firmware, because if we toy with it, so can they.

A player could look much more attractive with a little care given to its GUI. There is no reason in my mind as to why are these GUI so crappy looking. Any ideas why?

paulrbeers · **Joined:** Mon Oct 01, 2007 11:52 pm **Posts:** 465

xaveri wrote:

I've seen during the past months many videos from many players here in mp4nation and in other web pages and a general opinion is forming in my mind about the graphics designers that create the interfaces of these players...for the most part they suck!

What is wrong with these designers? I mean, I can understand how one company may create a bad interfaces with horrible looking graphics but how come most of them look like this? Are there no good Chinese graphical designers? The rule seems to be horrible fonts, bad taste in colors, rough edged images and lack of innovation in general. With a weeks worth of dedicated work I can take a GUI and change it completely so its not a matter of cost. And don’t tell me that the firmware comes like that and the companies that manufacture the equipment do not create the firmware, because if we toy with it, so can they.

A player could look much more attractive with a little care given to its GUI. There is no reason in my mind as to why are these GUI so crappy looking. Any ideas why?

Obviously this is pure speculation on my part, but I see many reasons:

1. Often times they use the "basic" firmware that is created by the chip designers that they built their device around so of course that basic firmware is used by everyone (and it was probably really just meant to show what the chip "could do").

2. Creating an interface requires money to be spent. It doesn't really affect capabilities (sure some enhancements can be done such as music sorting), but rather just makes their players pretty.....Why spend money on that? (that is purely a business question...I prefer good interfaces, but form a business standpoint....).

3. Speed. Make a basic interface to get the device out there....with how fast these things come out in China, if you spend the time on an interface, you could be passed up by a better device before you even get yours out the door.

Just some guesses.

brycewi · **Posted:** Sat Feb 02, 2008 7:13 am

On response to #2, Paul.

A good business knows that you need to spend money to make money.

A good looking GUI is obviously important to many consumers. Why wouldn't they just invest a small amount of money in improving the look (not necessarily the performance) of it and there's a good chance sales would increase for them based on the demand for a bit better quality.

Doesn't make sense why companies would cut costs at the opportunity of a potential profit.

But I'm not in the business world, so what do I know?

joshd963 · **Posted:** Sat Feb 02, 2008 8:02 am

I think somebody should make a widely compatible skin business for the majority of the chinese mp4 market & firmwares.

If it became well known, it could be quite profitable!

The companies themselves may even advertise this skinning company for like a small price.

maderin1 · **Joined:** Sun Sep 30, 2007 2:50 pm **Posts:** 20627

i think that if many of these player manufacturer put even a tenth of the effort into the GUI design and operation as they do into the promotion of these player then we would have some decent designs.

The recent RM970 is a good case for this, the amount of photography, images, designs and adverts around for this player is amazing All these had to be created by someone. There wsa a great GUI design for the 970 floating about that really looked the business, but it seems this was too much trouble to actually implement.

The issue of chinese designers is not an issue. If you look around many of the chinese fan site, especially the teclast ones, there are some beautiful designs made. These were for skinning up the c260 and 280 etc.

i wish i knew who actually does the designs on these players, especially for the standard interfaces. The problem that many companies get wrong is that they let the programmers implement the interface. This is a big problem in web design, many people are great at coding site functionality with languages like PHP etc, but have no idea of how to do graphic design, but it is usually left to the programmer to create the images needed to fit their code - a big mistake.

it is a shame that these companies do not invest the time and money in the design of th GUI and how it operates instead of paying lots of cute little chinese girls in little clothing to hold their player in yet another promo photo shoot ....eh ...hang on ... scrap that .... more girls and less packaging .. yep, that'll do it

joshd963 · **Posted:** Sat Feb 02, 2008 8:24 am

Quote:

it is a shame that these companies do not invest the time and money in the design of th GUI and how it operates instead of paying lots of cute little chinese girls in little clothing to hold their player in yet another promo photo shoot ....eh ...hang on ... scrap that .... more girls and less packaging .. yep, that'll do it

Got any examples of this? Rawr

xD

maderin1 · **Joined:** Sun Sep 30, 2007 2:50 pm **Posts:** 20627

joshd963 wrote:

Quote:

it is a shame that these companies do not invest the time and money in the design of th GUI and how it operates instead of paying lots of cute little chinese girls in little clothing to hold their player in yet another promo photo shoot ....eh ...hang on ... scrap that .... more girls and less packaging .. yep, that'll do it

Got any examples of this? Rawr

xD

now now josh ... stick to your cookies and mp4 players, there will be plenty of time for scantily clad, mp4 wielding little Chinese nymphets later in life.

well ... maybe just one

http://www.mp4users.com/teclast/656-tec ... ttest.html

there you go .. something to keep ya goin

joshd963 · **Posted:** Sat Feb 02, 2008 8:50 am

hehe

wind_dragon · **Posted:** Sat Feb 02, 2008 10:58 am

maderin1 wrote:

joshd963 wrote:

Quote:

it is a shame that these companies do not invest the time and money in the design of th GUI and how it operates instead of paying lots of cute little chinese girls in little clothing to hold their player in yet another promo photo shoot ....eh ...hang on ... scrap that .... more girls and less packaging .. yep, that'll do it

Got any examples of this? Rawr

xD

now now josh ... stick to your cookies and mp4 players, there will be plenty of time for scantily clad, mp4 wielding little Chinese nymphets later in life.

well ... maybe just one

http://www.mp4users.com/teclast/656-tec ... ttest.html

there you go .. something to keep ya goin

meh...i prefer japanese

Anaconda · **Posted:** Sat Feb 02, 2008 8:46 pm

I think they simply just don't want to "waste" time and money on developing their player. You know... most of these companys just makes their mp4 player and want to forgot about it... they just do next one

Quote:

meh...i prefer japanese

meh...I prefer Polish ;D

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