Interaction Design Lessons from Oblivion — Learning From Their Mistakes
The first article in this series covered why you should even bother studying sci-fi interfaces in the first place. Then in the previous article to this one, I deconstructed the different screens that make up Vika’s desktop. Now let’s see what we can learn from their mistakes.
Make sure you give timely feedback
As Jack is repairing one of the drones, Vika watches him over the Bubbleship camera feed. Scavs will often try to attack him while he’s repairing the drones, so this gives him an extra layer of security instead of just depending on sensors.
And while he’s working she can look at the live drone diagnostics and immediately tell Jack that the central core is off alignment. As soon as Jack finishes his repairs, the diagram updates immediately and a positive alert sound pings.
Overall, the messaging is pretty clear and gives real-time feedback — almost…
At one point in the film, as Vika is looking at the radar verifying visuals on the drones with Jack, the symbols for drones 166 and 172 begin flashing red and an alarm begins sounding — letting Vika know that the two drones are down.
Vika wants to send Jack to drone 166 first, so she presses and holds the drone symbol, which pulls up the coordinates. She then drags and drops the data onto the Bubbleship symbol — at which time the coordinates are immediately displayed on Jack’s HUD. All he has to do is follow the target area. Can’t really get much simpler than that. Except…
If you pay close enough attention to the video footage — ‘cuz, duh, geek — you’ll see that the drone status feed is already showing the drones down while Jack’s still on the landing pad at the Tower.
That’s fine, except the alert sound and blinking icons on the TETVision map aren’t there until Jack has already flown by the hydro-rigs. That’s quite a significant time lag between the drone status feed and the TETVision radar.
At the very least the drone icons should already be blinking red on the map on startup — at the very least. If this were a real-world solution, this would be a major fail resulting in a complete collapse of the security system.
Good for the Scavs, but bad for the TET’s objectives. So, make sure you give timely feedback.
Complex systems don’t have to look complex
If you line up all the different sections you can see that there’s a lot of stuff going on here. But how much of it is actually usable information?
You’ve got all of these different sections that are just fuidgetry – and some things that could be useful but aren’t really needed. This is actually a pretty common theme with sci-fi interfaces. Audiences seem to think that all of this glowing and blinking stuff makes the systems look more hi-tech and futuristic.
And we actually kind of have this problem in the real world, too. It’s in our nature to want to fill in the screen real estate because we tend to think — hey we’ve got all this free space — why not make use of it? The more features the better.
And in situations when you have a bunch of information that needs to be viewed quickly, we end up jamming everything onto one screen because we think that’s best way to do it. But in reality, this can actually backfire. It can overwhelm and distract users from their current task — and it can even make it more difficult to use.
Complex systems designed the right way bring up relevant information when it’s needed and let the user focus on the task at hand.
Multiple Users vs. Single User
The scale of this desktop is a bit large for a single user. This display size and setup is generally used for collaborative space so that multiple people can comfortably view and manipulate the data at the same time.
This large scale makes Vika have to constantly lean over the table because of the glare and angle of the screen. She also has to reach pretty far sometimes to interact with it.
Of course, the desk was probably designed this way for the audience’s benefit, but in a real-life situation this would be stressful on the body when using this over long periods of time every day.
Design for context
Of course, this comp isn’t anywhere near as beautiful as the one in the movie. And I’m sure there are many designers out there who would love to tackle mocking up a version of the desk that’s both ergonomic as well as a fine piece of artistic furniture, but for the purposes of this article, this will get point across.
Since Vika only interacts with the TETVision map and the other screens are purely informational, a more traditional type of desk setup could be used to minimize the glare and the reach. She can see all of the life-saving information at a glance and still interact comfortably with the map.
Overall, Vika’s Desktop is a beautiful piece of technology that performs its functions very well. But having to roll back and forth between screens during an emergency could literally mean the difference between life and death for Jack while he’s out in the field.
Consider the physical environment
At the beginning of the film, as Jack heads toward a downed drone, he suddenly flies into a dangerous lightning storm and nearly plunges to his death when his Bubbleship loses power. His signal disappears from the radar, but Vika has no idea what could have happened — or that there was any danger to begin with.
Since the weather is unstable and constantly changing — thanks again to the destruction of the moon — it would have been better to include a weather overlay. That way, Vika could have seen the danger and told Jack about it so he could fly around it instead of straight into it.
The user’s experience isn’t confined to just the actual screen. Their environments play an important role in the overall experience as well, so be sure to take this into to account.
Provide consistent feedback
It doesn’t actually show it in the film, but the way Vika interacts with the TETVision in other situations makes me think that she brings up the different video camera feeds by tapping on the respective label in the right side panel.
But if that’s the case, there’s a problem with consistency in user feedback.
There are at least 4 instances in the film where the highlighted labels don’t match what’s being displayed. I could go on and on about why this is all very confusing, but my friends told me I was being too analytical and detailed for what is supposed to be an overview, so I cut that part out…
But basically the lesson is that you should always provide clear and consistent labeling and feedback.
Don’t forget — or ignore — accessibility
The colors on the TETVision map are very muted. Even alert messages are muted and blend in with the background — and each other.
The colors are so similar that it’s hard to see them even if you aren’t colorblind. A person who is, may not even see the alert. They would only hear the alarm and be frantically searching the screen to find the problem.
If this were designed for the real-world a large number of the population would find it unusable –and even unsafe in certain situations.
So again, don’t forget accessibility in design.
Which rig is down?
This is one of the least thought-out designs of the bunch since it doesn’t get any focused screen-time and doesn’t do much in the way of supporting the story. But, the footage we do get shows one very serious issue.
The only function of this hydro-rig status screen is to … show the status of … the hydro-rigs. That’s why Jack and Vika are there to begin with — to keep the hydro-rigs safe.
After the Scavs take out one of the rigs in a gigantic show of fireworks, there is no noticeable change in this screen. Where is the alert message telling Vika which rig is offline?
Alert messaging shows up on other screens such as the drone status feed, but this screen stays the same throughout the entire film.
So, what was that main objective again?
In the real world, as time goes by and complications arise, project teams can lose focus from their original objective. That’s why it’s a good idea to keep the objectives and goals written down in a prominent location so you can refer back to them often.
Again, the main objective of Jack and Vika’s mission to Earth is to keep the hydro-rigs safe.
As I just mentioned in the previous section, after the Scavs blow up the hydro-rig there’s not really much of a clear visual difference between the rigs that are online and the ones that are offline on this screen either.
Yes, they are well aware that the rig exploded in this case, but there could be any number of reasons a rig would go down. And this is the only indication.
No error message … no alarm … just a slightly greyed out icon.
Greyed out icons in and of themselves are not a bad thing. They’re often successfully used to indicate when something isn’t enabled or active.
But…
When the inactive icons are almost the same color as the active ones, that doesn’t really help anyone. And … again … the colors are so similar that a person who is colorblind may not even notice the difference.
Oh, right — and did I mention that the whole reason Jack and Vika are there — the whole for their mission — is to make sure the hydro-rigs are safe and running properly?
Now that we’ve learned some valuable lessons from their mistakes, in the next article we’ll see what we can do to mine the blind spots and turn the bad ideas into good ones.
Please look forward to it.
This article is the third in a series, in which I recap some of the Interaction Design lessons I derived from the Sci-Fi film Oblivion for the nerdsourcing project launched a few years ago on scifiinterfaces.com — the companion site to the book “Make It So” by Chris Noessel and Nathan Shedroff.
You can also check out the full project on their website.
