Disney DVD's Are Broken

Today's cause of broken-ness is what Seth Godin calls the "I am not a fish" principle. Take a look at this culvert:


Salmon trying to swim upstream would have a lot of difficulty navigating a culvert like this, and that's because whoever designed it was, clearly, not a fish.

Design is decoupled from use. Also known as: I just build these things, I don't have to work with them.

User Interface design is one of the great challenges of programming, and for every truly great UI, there are scads of pitiful ones. Restaurant websites are notoriously awful, but my go-to example for horrific design is the Disney DVD.

These are interfaces designed by a committee that is completely divorced from the world of watching-movies-at-home. Where else can you get the trademarked "FastPlay" option? FastPlay, for those of you playing at home, is a button you press that jumps straight to the movie, but not without first showing you every preview on the disc in an unskippable manner. And good luck trying to find a feature, because you can't. Features are arbitrarily divided into incomprehensible menus based on... well, god knows what. I'll give you an example.

Pop in the features disc for Monsters, Inc., and you'll find that all of the special features are divided into "monsters only" or "humans only".

Buh?

Abby wanted to show me a feature off that disc and we searched through probably three or four menus before we broke down and consulted the flow-chart. You read that right, flowchart. Disney is completely aware of the fact that their DVD menus are non-navigable, and their solution to this is to include a fucking map.

Disney's bad, but they're far from alone. Software is, on the whole... awful. For a great discussion of a would-have-been good game mired by poor UI, I recommend Evan's review of Empire: Total War. He also has a good piece comparing search engines by their interface (this was pre-bing). For examples of UI done right, look at anything made by Google or Valve--there are reasons both companies are at the forefront of their fields. Both started small, but they work hard to make things usable (Valve kept Team Fortress 2 in development for 9 years, because they refused to put out a game that wasn't fun).

What can Disney learn from them? It's not enough to make a good product. You have to make it usable as well. The fact that your customers are children is not an excuse. You just have to work harder.

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