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Usability in the Movies -- Top 10 Bloopers
Ant writes "A UseIt.com article talks about user interfaces (UIs) in film that are more exciting than they are realistic, and heroes have far too easy a time using foreign systems. The way Hollywood depicts usability could fill many a blooper reel. Here are 10 of the most egregious mistakes made by moviemakers. From the article: '3. The 3D UI - In Minority Report, the characters operate a complex information space by gesturing wildly in the space in front of their screens. As Tog found when filming Starfire, it's very tiring to keep your arms in the air while using a computer. Gestures do have their place, but not as the primary user interface for office systems.'"
What, am I the only one reading this crap on Christmas Eve?
... click on My Computer ... then My Network Places ... then log in again ... then private -> secret -> projects -> 2006 -> world domination ... and then wait for Office to load.
Think about how tedious a computer scene would be if the user had to navigate Windows, KDE, or even Mac OS X. While the herione was trying to find her husband's company's secret documents she'd log in
The way it works in the movies is the way it should work. Log in, type "find Kyoto meeting minutes", a bunch of matrix-ish characters scroll across the screen, and there it is.
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On the other hand, most of the people watching those experts in TV and film aren't experts and haven't the slightest idea how a real expert would behave. The idea in a movie is to make the action appear realistic to the majority of the audience. Whether it is actually realistic is secondary. Yes, that will alienate some small percentage of the said audience who have the experience to perceive the error, but from a cinematic perspective that's a small price to pay. Hey, this is Slashdot and most of us are computer-literate far beyond the norm, but you can bet your boots that there are many people from other disciplines that just want to rip their eyes out when they watch scenes that would just make us think, "Whoa ... cool."
By way of example, in the original pilot of Star Trek (original series) the test audience felt the opening sequence felt unnatural, because when the Enterprise was zooming into view there was no sound. That was as it should have been, this being a starship traveling through vacuum parsecs from anything resembling an atmosphere. However, as soon as Roddenbery's people added the swoosh! sound effect, everybody was happy. I've seen both sequences and I must admit I prefer it with the sound, even though I know better.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
My teachers (from grade school to college) had no problems gesturing and writing on whiteboards all day, also something tells me that painters, form carpenters, etc. etc. (especially in days gone by, without power nailers and spray guns) can keep their hands up in the air all day long no problem.
-- the cake is a lie
I remember watching Minority Report and having the opposite response. The UI seemed very plausible. If we are talking about writing up word documents, then no. But if we are talking about video editing and imaging, it seemed very realistic. In fact, it was so realistic that someone created a set of input devices very similar to those in the movie. I remember there being an article here about it a few months ago. Someone was playing warcraft.
That would be the reason why my family absolutely hates watching most movies with me. I have enough of a photographic memory that if I've read something somewhere, no matter when it was or how old I was, I remember it. Combine that with the fact that as a child, my mother's response to "I'm bored" was "Read a book," and her response to "But I don't have any books to read" was "Read the encyclopedia," and the upshot is that between reading the encyclopedia and all of the random books I've read over the years, I've been acquiring a vast compendium of marginally useful information on entirely unrelated topics from about the time I learned how to read. It's great for playing board games, but not so much for watching movies. There are too many topics that I'm sufficiently familiar with that I can recognize glaring errors. And, I figure that if I know enough to recognize the error, then probably everything else is wrong too, which then compulsively sends me online to find out exactly what all of the errors are (and which ends up adding new information to my useless information database, which further ruins movies for me and those watching with me).
Eagles may soar, but weasles don't get sucked into jet engines...
"I remember watching "The Lone Gunman" one day (thank God that show didn't make it!) and they needed more processing power to crack a password to take over a hijacked plane. "We could do this if had one of those new Octium 4's!" Well, they get one, right before the plane hits the building, they pull out their existing processor, I assume and Octium 3, and drop in the new Octium 4, without so much as powering the machine off... and BAM! They had their password and saved the plane. Oh, and no processors had any type of thermal anything!"
Nothing odd. On mainframes you can pull complete assembies off, and add without powering down. Some of the old timers here can tell you of hardware that could take almost anything and survive. It's just consumer equipment that has lowered everyone's expectations.
> ... nobody uses the can ...
but then, in Pulp Fiction, whenever something serious is going down, John Travolta is in the can.
i) Robbery at the diner.
ii) Mia ODing
iii) Bruce Willis returning to his apartment to fetch his daddys watch - consequently ends up shooting Travolta while he is *in the can*.
So, just wanted to point out that there is at least one movie where 'can usage' is central to the story.
Just cross-reference your results with the uniform size database. One more reason for custom-tailored uniforms.
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
Let's take the ATM machine for example. Initially the machine was created to reduce the load on tellers for easily automated tasks. These machines would often directly generate revenue by charging customers for the transactions. Therefore, these machines pretty quickly had well designed interfaces that allowed relatively rapid transactions. The rapid transactions were important because the higher the rate of transactions, the more money. As time went by, however, the charges for most transactions were eliminated, the marketing people realized that a person at an ATM machine was a captive audience, so the primary purpose of an ATM became to advertise services. The result is that the current generation of ATM have horrible interfaces in terms of customer usability and rapid transactions, which really puts the customer at a unnecessary risk, but wonderful a wonderful interface in terms of forces customers to view advertising. In terms of the purpose, aside from the fact that the customer is endangered, there is nothing wrong with the interface
Likewise, a web page has to be judged to it's purpose. If one is a newspaper, then one is going to want to present news, but equally important generate revenue to support the page. Therefore the page must be complicated not only to organize the news, but to display pictures, and to display enoug ad content to pay for the page. Much of the complexity of any commercial page in fact comes from the need to integrate ads and content.
So, if ads are not critical, and the content is straightforward, how complex does a page have to be, and is complexity itself a goal? I fear many believe that complexity is a virtue. On one intranet page I work with, at least a third of the real estate is wasted on branding and other non content. Often less that half the area is available for the content one is interested in. Nothing is linked properly. All the energy and money is spent on useless branding and cool design.
Now, look at useit.com again. The site itself is an ad, so needs no additional ads. The branding is clear, and avoids banner blindness by using text for the titles. Each section is clearly marked, and the one picture clearly promotes Nielsen. There are no other extraneous pictures to distract from this promotion. Since Nielsen offers tips on how to attract and keep customers through the user interface, and not the technical details on how to develop the interface, there is not benefit to whiz bang programming.
So here is the deal. The parent post is right and wrong. It is wrong to criticize the useit webpage, falling into the oft citing fallacy that a more complex web page is more usable. This fallacy will likely be the cause of the failure of many new web pages, and is already the cause of waste of million, if not billions, in public funds. However, the parent is correct that the minority report interface is not significantly defective, but not for the reasons cited. As a computer interface, it is probably lacking. However, the interface is not meant to be a communication protocol. Rather, it is a dramatic tool. Therefore, if Nielsen is judging is as a computer interface, then this is another example where Nielsen has completely missed the point. The only reasonable measure of success or failure can be if the interface communicated the intentions and results to the audience. And, as much as we hate the big login screen, it is what the audience needs.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
It's hilarious that you mock that particular Lone Gunmen episode for not being correctly prophetic for something so marginal as the chip for their computer. It's like chastising a tv show for the characters always knowing exactly how to cock, reload, aim and use an assault rifle.
That episode, by the way, was about terrorists hijacking a commercial plane and crashing it into the World Trade Center. It aired like six months before 9/11. Makes me wonder what sort of other depressing crap those other movies are going to get right.
If only we had one of those new Octium 4's. indeed.
Meanwhile, there's Jack Bauer in "24" -- the guy goes 24 hours (dragged out over 24 episodes!) without ever using the can once. Then again, he never eats or drinks anything either, so I suppose there's nothing in his system to excrete.
Speaking of The Matrix, it actually contains some of the most realistic use of computers seen in movies: nmap, a too old version of ssh, and some buffer overflow exploit code (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sshnuke; it's about 1h43m into the movie).
What really impress me is the hero's ability to navigate through an old-fashioned paper archive.
The hero and the heroine break into the very big company, find the small room with the "Archives" sign on the door, open the drawer "E-G", browse through the nicely arranged folders, and pick the folder with the incrimination evidence.
Where I work, we have paper archives all over the place. Even though we know the system, it can take a day finding the information we are looking for.
Her grandfather ran the place. If I were a rich grandfather, and my granddaughter loved computers, I would get her the same computers I used at my super-duper dino ranch. Duh. So she would've known Unix, and she would've known the interface they used at the installation.
All this griping because the kid knew Unix was stupid. It makes sense in the context of the movie, which is all that matters. I mean, filling in dino DNA with frog DNA was ridiculous, but it worked within the confines of the movie.
At twelve, I was programming assembly language on the Apple ][ for high-speed 3D wireframe graphics (like Bill Budge's cool toolkit, only sucky). It's not surprising a bright kid wouldn't know how to fly through a 3D interface on which she already had experience thanks to her understanding and very rich grandfather.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
almost more to the point is that i bet you ask tarantino why that's the case, and among all the character-building aspects of travolta being 'on the can' at those moments, you will find that the simple planning behind it is that the very reason bathrooms _aren't_ utilized in movies to their potential.