Usability Forum

Imaginative future interfaces

By Dan Alexandru. Thursday, 14. June 2007, 10:01:55

interface, design, television, Plug & Chug

I love films showing "hackers" entering code by pressing random keys while the input box on screen has no cursor. This is not about one of those films, quite the opposite.

Originally posted by Salvador Dali:

We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.

This post started about a graphic designer's work for film and television. Mark Coleran's portfolio as a clip, which I recommend. Since there's too much to see, please consider watching the big resolution version, keep the sound off, and use the space key generously to pause and investigate the interfaces from:

Alien vs Predator: Design of vision elements for Predator
The Island: Art direction, Screen design and animation for onset playback
Mr & Mrs Smith: Art direction, Screen design and animation for post insert
Blade 2: Art direction, Screen design and animation for onset playback
My Little Eye: Art direction, Screen design and animation for post insert
Mee Shee - The Water Giant: Art direction, Screen design and animation for onset playback
Cody Banks 2: Art direction, Screen design and animation for post insert
Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Screen design and animation for onset playback
Harry Potter & TPoA: Processing & effects of imagery for composite
The World Is Not Enough: Screen design and animation for onset playback
The Bourne Identity: Screen design and animation for post insert
Triple X 2: Screen design and animation for onset playback
Picadilly Pictures: Design and animation for film leader
BBC News 24: Design and animation for channel promotion
Cartoon Network: Design and animation for channel identity graphics
Layerlab: Design and animation for promotional graphics
CNX: Design, animation and deployment of channel identity graphics
13th Street: Design and animation for graphic cut elements

But this clip shows the exact reason I watch LFN reruns to look at the background screens, or why some people fall in love with interfaces.

Incidentaly, Del.icio.us's recommended tags for the website included art, design, graphics, inspiration, interface, motion.

don't trust your intuition: keyring usabilityMaybe rethink the ads a bit...

Comments

gr8dude # 20. June 2007, 18:44

Very nice interfaces, they're extremely beautiful. I'm more than just impressed.

However, we should not confuse productivity and usability with eye-candy.

This article has convinced me to write about an idea that I thought of earlier: BHS - the Bank Hacking System, http://ralien.nytka.org/index.php/2007/06/18/bhs_the_bank_hacking_system

It's an abstract way to describe eye-candy interfaces in movies... I'm afraid they're not suitable for real world applications. For instance, check out the sequence with Coleran's fingerprint scanner (from "Bourne's Identity") - it is filled with a lot of redundant graphical information; while in real world applications you just need a "Pass" or "Fail" message on the screen, and maybe a number that indicates how much the hand matches the template against which it was compared.

Nevertheless, the GUI's are very pretty, I take my hat off.

Schneemann # 20. June 2007, 20:18

Animations like this can actually be quite helpful to provide a mental model. With a plain message "fingerprint check failed", you might get the idea that the scanner doesn't work, or the drivers are missing. Plain text could do the same job, but the perceptual channels for images and animations are a much faster way straight into your brain!

gr8dude # 27. June 2007, 11:05

You're right, but this is just a matter of writing error messages right.

For example, "fingerprint check failed" -> "this is a different person" or something of that sort.

At the same time, other messages would be "no biometric device was found" or "the detected biometric device does not have a driver".