Jakob Nielsen and the Marauding Dinosaur

Wednesday January 3, 2007

Jakob Nielsen has been delivering articles to my inbox for some time now. Watching the Jurassic Park films over Christmas, I was reminded of his recent Usability in the Movies — Top 10 Bloopers. Nielsen has also seen Jurassic Park and notes the Unix system preferred by Richard Attenborough’s IT department:

In the film Jurassic Park, a 12-year-old girl has to use the park’s security system to keep everyone from being eaten by dinosaurs. She walks up to the control terminal and utters the immortal words, “This is a Unix system. I know this.” And proceeds to (temporarily) save the day.
Leaving aside the plausibility of a 12-year-old knowing Unix, simply knowing Unix is not enough to immediately use any application running on the system. Yes, she could probably have used vi on the security terminal. But the specialized security system would have required some learning time — significant learning time if it were built on Unix, which has notoriously inconsistent user interface design and thus makes it harder to transfer skills from one application to the next.

Watching the film the other day I sniggered to myself at this scene but I let it go. After all, I’d already accepted the premise that scary dinosaurs were on the loose, so I was prepared to let a clever kid hack into the Jurassic Park operating system and breeze through its user interface.

I always enjoy Jakob Nielsen’s articles, but he’s onto a loser if he thinks he’s going to find plausibility in the movies. I hope his enjoyment of Jurassic Park wasn’t spoiled, with him throwing his popcorn into the air and storming from the cinema ten minutes before the end shouting “this isn’t plausible!” Listen Jakob, I’m going to propose a little less attention to plausibility in the movies. My daughter loves the Jurassic Park films but was bored by the first half hour or so of the first two instalments. These are the introductory parts to the films, delivered quite lazily I thought in the second chapter, where everything has to be explained:

In Jurassic Park II, this translates as:

Why can’t we just have a very brief scene-setter at the beginning of the film, perhaps a voice-over announcing:

The dinosaurs are now on an island. Jeff Goldblum is there with a woman and a child. Danger.

For Jurassic Park III it could be:

More scary dinosaurs chasing people, mainly because a trilogy tends to suit DVD packages quite well.

Simplicity is the approach adopted by most of the Japanese monster films, and I’m sure one began with the simple but to the point “here is Godzilla…” I just don’t need the ins and outs to explain a scenario that will always remain fantastic. This is why I could never be bothered with Star Wars, where half of the films are taken up by explaning who’s who, who’s who’s dad/sister and what’s already happened/is going to happen. And I gave up on Star Trek when I went to see one of the films with a friend who felt obliged to provide a detailed running commentary for ninety minutes.

We watched a lot of cinema and made for television films over Christmas. Few of them were plausible and many offered irritating sub-plots. Most were generally confusing, and became more so when people asked questions over important dialogue. Some of the queries raised in our crowded household included:

Other distractions include the spotting of actors who may or may not have appeared in other things, which always prompts exclamations such as “it’s him!” or “is that the bloke from This Life?”

I always give the same answer. “Sshhh!”

Post a comment

Textile formatting *bold* and _italic_ welcome.

Use preview and then submit.

Pages

Subscribe

Blogroll

Reading

Listening

Tags