As a designer and analyst, I often notice the use of web sites or systems in television and movies. I was just watching Casino Royale the other night, struck by how elegant the various systems that James Bond tapped into were. The other night I saw a movie called The Holiday in which Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet meet on a house exchange website and happen to just enter a chat room without a login or registration process—and the chat room is really nice. CSI would have us believe that most government systems speak perfectly to each other, and that Photoshop works a whole lot better for their lab techs than it does for me. Movies and TV present to us a world beautifully designed (and apparently load balanced), where everything that’s going on is readable to the viewer instantaneously (this is, of course, a different phenomenon to, say, Star Trek, where the interfaces look pretty, but it’s impossible to imagine how anyone can use colored squares to perform complex functions—but it’s scifi, so the willing suspension of disbelief applies).
Yet movies and television shows that depict interfaces give me something to aspire to—where the most pertinent information is displayed perfectly at all times. Fiction often functions to help us visualize the possible. Clearly the art directors and designers for film and TV know how to display information quickly, efficiently, and creatively. They taunt us with what’s possible. And it occurs to me that we should try to take these lessons to heart as UI and UX evolve.
The excitement of the visual interface shouldn’t be ignored, and we are now beginning now to find ways to generate that excitement in real, and not only fictional interfaces. Get people excited about system design. A common mantra in Freshman composition is “show, don’t tell.” The evolution of systems design is to do just that—way before the first line of code is written. Show them what they’re going to get—don’t just describe it.
I recently worked on a project where I saw this excitement in a way I hadn’t really ever seen before. In a large group setting, people were watching the simulations of the system we were working on. The sheer power of making it happen like in the movies was testament to the power of rapid prototyping for complex systems. The team was engaged in a way I’ve way I’ve never seen—a testament to the drama of user interfaces that until now, I’ve only seen in movies.
