See, there are good silver persons too!
This applies more to program user interfaces, but I once had an interesting conversation with a developer who said that, for a long time, heâd put a lot of work into the background coding of a program. Then, when it was time to put the interface together, he was usually rushed, tired of the whole thing, and would throw something together that, based on his intimate knowledge of the background, seemed logical. Finally it occurred to him that the reason people complained about the interfaces of his programs was because he was going at the process backward.
It seems stupid to have to say this, but it seems that an important thing to keep in mind in any interface design is the end user.
I canât imagine using that Minority Report interface full time.
I can barely take holding and iPad up to read for long, a full day of waving your hands around would be exhausting as fuck.
Plus I would be constantly knocking my coffee over.
I was told there would be Shrek.
I vote for LCARS, from TNG and beyond. While itâs not entirely consistent over the seasons (and series), itâs always portrayed as intuitive, easy to use, essentially fool-proof - and it still looks pretty cool to this day, almost 30 years after Denise and Michael Okuda designed it (seriously: Say what you will about all the beiges and browns - itâs simply astonishing how little the set and art design of the Enterprise D has aged.)
If TOSâ communicator anticipated cellphones, LCARS anticipated 21st-century touch screen interfaces.
I always assumed that user interfaces in movies and on tv shows werenât designed to be practical but rather to communicate to the audience what it is the characters were doing. We can laugh about the silly UI in âHackersâ when theyâre hacking the Gipson but making Unix command lines interesting is a tall order. Tron: Legacy did an ok job with this early in the movie but mainly because the narrative made what appeared on the computer screen irrelevant.
My best worst would be the animated tiny metal cubes display from the first X-Men movie.
I always liked the spaceship controls from âSilent Runningâ â they had bog-standard keyboards bolted to desks, with CRT displays. Not good for rapid-response, but if you want to key in a maneuver sequence, you at least have a chance.
Arenât there whole websites cataloging movie computer UIs?
I wasnât sure why Lowell had to rewire the drone though.
âBest-Worstâ isnât the most accessible interface. Which axis does âBestâ refer to, and which axis does âWorstâ refer to? Perhaps âFlashy, Inconsistentâ would be a better way of describing âBest Worstâ. Or is that âMundane-Consistentâ? Thatâs not terrible elegant.
But if youâre taking about the 3 dimensional map in Xmen, Make it so informs us that 3d map generators based on pin grid screens have been sold to the military, and other users who need to understand local terrain.
In an interesting twist on the bad UI theme, the graph displayed isnât actually a graph. There are no axes plural, just a progression from worst to best, which he describes out of order. âBest-Worstâ is actually âthe best of the worstâ, and âWorst-Bestâ is actually âthe worst of the bestâ.
I continue to be irrationally annoyed by the sheer physical impossibility of those damn âhologramâ images floating in mid-air, as projected by R2-D2 in Star Wars, manipulated by Tom Cruise in Minority Report and popping up in just about every sci-fi movie since ( and even erstwhile police procedurals on TV, such as CSI and Bones).
If youâre waiting for that particular UI to show up in real life, youâll be waiting until the laws of optics are repealed â thatâs just not how light works.
Just sayinâ, yâknow.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
