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Designing the Computer UIs In Movies
xandroid points out an NPR interview with Mark Coleran, who
"...designs the fancy-but-fake graphics that flash across computers in the movies. He has worked on a laundry list of blockbusters: The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Ultimatum, Children of Men, Mission Impossible III, and many more. He says a lot of the inspiration for computer screens comes from video games." The main point of these fake movie UIs is different than that of real UIs: to tell a story very quickly, not to reveal and enable function.
This wouldn't be a problem but it is part of a general tendency in Hollywood to favor looks cool and quickly understandable over accurate. This is understandable. But, it does lead to serious problems. This has lead for example to the general problem(called the CSI effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSI_effect after the television show) that juries now often have ideas about what forensic scientists can do that have little to do with reality. This also happens simply with less knowledgable people interacting with computers. And the subject of this interview is apparently to blame. I have had some experience helping older people with computers where they seem genuinely confused about what computers can do, or what you can use computers to do. And when they have major misconceptions the misconceptions inevitably are of a form that one would get from seeing a TV show or movie.
The story of the movie of course. Most movies don't revolve around computers.
Movie/TV interface design peaked with LCARS.
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As a IT guy I hate being asked by a lay person "Do you understand what he's doing on that screen?" when we're watching some movie or TV show with a completely fake UI on some computer.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Well I rather see some fancy things in movies. Movies generally never show exact true life anyway in any area. Why should they in computer.
Life isn't a soap opera. Life isn't a love story. Life isn't about looking like Brad Pitt. Life isn't an action movie. You aren't Vin Diesel.
But movies are entertainment. I rather see some fancy looking computer interface in a movie than watch gentoo compiling nano for 50 mins and then crashing to an unresolvable state that requires complete reinstall of the system.
The difference between movie UIs and real UIs is actually, in many respects, pretty similar to the difference between movie plots and real life (lack of) plots.
Real UIs always have a strongly generic character, because they are usually rather multipurpose(and even the fairly strongly single-purpose ones, industrial inventory systems and such, are often just special cases of horribly general enterprise stacks, hacked together by hacks for economic reasons). They have to expose a great many of the system's features because they have no way of knowing which ones the user is going to want. Movie UIs can be highly specific, without any visible provision for doing anything other than what is happening at that very moment; because they exist only for the purposes of the story. A particularly driven production team might want to make them look more generic, just to enhance the verisimilitude of the world by making it seem less wrapped around the story; but that is very much optional.
This is analogous to how movie plots work. In a movie, everything that happens, every character who exists, all accidents of fate, and so forth, is there by design, in order to advance the plot. There might be red herrrings, specifically to throw the audience off, or generic extras, to make things look realistic; but everything that matters exists and acts because it serves the plot. In real life, things just exist, probabilities are settled by chance. Only teleologists and the mentally ill are aware of a grand design being served.
Evil Guy: You will now wire 1 gazillion dollars to my account in Switzerland or the Cayman Islands.
... >
Noob: Ok, whatever you say, >
Evil Guy: I have won! I am a Gazillionaire! There is nothing you can do to stop me now
Noob: Oh, Nooooooooo! Release my daughter/wife/boyfriend!
Evil Guy: I have the money already, I'll just shoot them instead
Noob: No, I'll come crashing through the wall in a hail of bullets and stop you
*** Meanwhile, back in the real world! ***
Evil Guy: Send me the money...blah blah blah.
Actual Real Person: OK, here you go
Evil Guy: I have the money now, you get nothing
Actual Real Person (with FBI/Interpol agent): No, you have nothing but an entry on a computer screen. Gov't just froze those Assets and you don't even know it. Now, where is my daughter/wife/boyfriend whatever.
Negotiation begins...
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
UI doesn't matter, but unlimited zoom must be there!
The Matrix outside view wasn't Viewer Friendly, it was supposed to be the 24th century equivalent of a command line. The only guy who could really understand it was the geek.
Well-written and well-directed fool the viewer into thinking the events are plausible. The less the viewer must suspend their disbelief, the more enjoyable the movie, play, book, etc. For example: A director could use a real car in a scene. Or they could make the car out of two giant pieces of cardboard with painted-on wheels. Or they could use a real car, but spray paint it with the word "CAR" on the side and replace the steering wheel with a wagon wheel. But generally they don't do that - they use a car that is appropriate to the scene. They should do the same thing for ovens, sandwiches, furniture, and computers. It is a bit odd to see a modern, relatively intelligent scene, where the login screen has dancing lightning beams and lasers firing, and a voice that yells "Access Denied" - no computer actually does that.
If you watch TV or movies, you see this with virtually any subject you could imagine. What it boils down to is that generally the people making the content need to dumb down everything to what Joe Average expects to see. If you've got greater-than-average knowledge of any field, chances are when you see people doing it on TV they're fucking something up.
We've already heard countless examples of computer GUIs. How about medicine? I was a paramedic, and my wife is an ER doc, and both of us cringe every time we see someone onscreen get a giant needle stabbed into their chest. Ever since Uma got the treatment in Pulp Fiction (maybe there were earlier ones, but that's the first time I remember seeing it) this is a great little dramatic moment that they love to stick into films and TV shows. In real life drugs go into a vein and even if the heart isn't going you can circulate with a little CPR. Jamming giant needles into the heart is just silly.
And while we're on the subject, all the CPR I see onscreen is shit. The last time I was certified was 2005 so I might be out of date, but last I checked we were at 30:2 compression/breath ratio at a rate of about 100 compressions per minute. Our memory aid was that we could compress to the tune of Queen's 'Another One Bites the Dust' (funny, I know) and that would get us pretty close. On TV it's way too slow, not to mention pretty rare that 30 seconds of CPR will magically revive someone without the addition of a defibrillator and lots of drugs.
I don't know dick about car repair, but I know what to do if I'm in a movie. I ask the hot chick on the side of the road to pop the hood, I stick my head in there, jiggle a few wires, then say, "Try it now." Then it'll start right up. Or possibly blow up, depending on the movie. Oh, and if you need to hotwire a car, you just yank that bundle of wires out from under the dash and tap a couple of them together until it sparks.
How about firearms? Again, I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure when you shoot someone with a 9mm it won't knock them off their feet and throw their body 10 feet backwards through a plate glass window. But it sure looks nifty.
General electronics? It doesn't really matter what you're doing here; defusing a bomb, fixing a broken radio, breaking into a vault, etc. You just open up whatever device you're dealing with, connect a few jumpers with alligator clips on the end, clip another wire with a set of cutters and poof, you're golden. Just don't cut the green wire. Or was it the blue wire?
I'm sure most people could come up with similar things they see all the time, these are just a few of the ones that I notice. I probably gloss over lots more simply because for those subjects, I am the Joe Average and whatever they're doing looks totally plausible to me even though someone somewhere is gnashing their teeth over it.
But we know the OSS guys can't ever agree on some fancy UI (superfluous)...
Lets be honest here, the OSS guys can barely agree on which letter should appear if you press the "A" key, never mind before you introduce shift, ctrl, alt, option, meta, super or chording.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?