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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.
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.
And what story is that? That computers in the future are shiny and pretty if not outright magical?
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The Viewer Friendly Interface trope was (surprisingly) largely averted in the Matrix where only a little Hollywood was wrapped around an almost unmodified nmap and sshnuke.
He's not the guy to blame for people's misconceptions regarding computers. He's just doing his job and making stuff look pretty. Blaming him would be like blaming some make up guy for making Hollywood starlets set an impossibly high bar for beauty. Or script writers for giving people misconceptions about how life works. Rather, it's the failing of the educational system for not adequately educating people regarding technology, which still remains a set of magic boxes for the lay man.
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This for the ones who think Movie-OS interfaces are cool and slick looking: They're not efficient, they're not sensible, they are not intuitive and most of all, they're not useable.
I often run into people who ask me "Why isn't this or that program designed like that one in this or that movie". Because it would not be usable. A few examples how Movie-OS interfaces are very, very poorly designed, from a usability point of view.
1) They're slow. Cue CSI fingerprint patching program. The program displays every single failed compare in quick flash forward display. Pulling the whole dataset from the database and rendering it takes time. This time is wasted. You would not want your program to do that.
2) Hard to reach buttons. Unfortunately, Knight Rider is the only example that comes to my mind right now, but it's true for far too many movies. Buttons located overhead, out of reach, sometimes requiring the user/pilot to stop doing whatever he is doing right now, move his hands and punch a minuscle button somewhere awkward. Yes, it looks cool, but it's about as sensible as putting the gear stick behind the driver's seat.
3) 100" see through displays. Again CSI (but it's made its way into various other movies by now). Yes, we all want bigger displays. Bigger is better. But there's a limit to better. Especially if, as in CSI, the additional space is not used to present more information but just to display the information in larger font or to fill it with more pointless gimmicky pictures. The angle your eye can see sharp in and can easily catch is very tiny. The diameter of the screen has to be viewable by moving your eyes alone and without strain, or it can just as well be accessible by scrolling.
4) Lifted-hands interface. Lacking a better term I dubbed it that: An interface that does not allow your hand to rest but requires you to lift them and reach. First of all, it's inaccurate. You are moving your hand from your shoulder instead of your wrist, which does limit your accuracy quite a bit. It's straining and tiring. Especially when you're supposed to hit tiny icons, this is magnitudes worse than traditional input.
5) Touch input. While we're at it. Touch input becomes so popular in cellphones that EVERYTHING has to be touch input now. In case you didn't notice: It's popular because you have the input device in your palm. Now put it upright like a computer screen and tell me how convenient, comfortable or accurate it is. Not to mention that you're covering the info you try to access with your fingers, which means that you will have to lift your hand to see what you're doing. It's comfortable for quick input, but not for constant use.
Basically, Movie-OS interfaces look cool and dramatic, and that's what they're good for. They are not good for use.
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I remember being slightly irked by computer scenes in 80's movies: while showing a person typing command line text, the displayed text was revealed at a constant rate, probably about that of a 150 baud modem. The appearance is vastly different than that of someone actually typing.
Same with early attempts at showing GUI use - constant, linear movements of the cursor.
I suspect that the problem came from lack of the computer / tech equivalent of a 'sound guy'. No way would a sound engineer allow an otherwise well-made movie to be released with out of sync, or unnatural spoken word.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
True.
The newfangled action UI's like the ones in TFA look like toy packaging.
Read the Movie OS arc at userfriendly.org, starting here: http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20010111
The movie Antitrust was pretty realistic and accurate. The computer interface that was shown was Gnome. Even the lines of code that were displayed had been borrowed from Open source projects. Maybe that is because the producers listen to professional consultant (among which there was de Icaza). I am sure there are other examples of good UI, but indeed they are a minority.
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Smoke a spliff, maybe throw some Bob Marley on the stereo and chill out, man.
everything that matters exists and acts because it serves the plot.
Everything that matters, right.
So what would be the problem with showing an actual ssh "access denied" or "someone is doing something nasty" message? Or with using real security-related tools like netcat and iptables? I mean, sure, most of the screen is going to be irrelevant, but I'm sure the actors are going to be able to tell you what's going on, and it's still throwing in a bunch of "red herrings" or "generic extras" in the UI, still everything that matters serves the plot.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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.
Personally I liked how the character of Trinity used nmap to find a host with a vulnerable version of SSH (along with the SSHv1 CRC32 vulnerability). Nmap has actually been in a few movies:
http://nmap.org/movies.html
Quite a number of movies and TV shows use Apple ][ assembler dumps for various computer-related activities; I imagine the intent in those cases is to present something which looks both cryptic and meaningful.
One of the reasons I like gentoo is that watching the compiler messages scroll up the screen makes it feel like a movie computer. They always have a window with messages scrolling quickly by. The true fancy computer interfaces reduce clutter and can look rather boring on (movie) screen.
I just re-watched all three Bourne movies recently. What I love in movie/TV UIs is that they're apparently still stuck in the command line era. Nearly every episode of ALIAS, James Bond movies, etc. etc. people are slamming away at the keyboard like they're cybering with a rock-hard pants tent, but when's the last time you can remember someone using a mouse?
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