Lee Brenner, of digital design firm thirteen23, prefaces his main points of a talk about borrowing cinematic techniques when designing software from my favorite director:
“It’s not where you take things from, it’s where you take them.” -Jean Luc Godard
How appropriate it is to begin this discussion with a quote from a director who broke so many cinematic rules. With software, who needs loads of menus that are clicked on only to lead one to more menus? Why not change drop-down menus and lists, to movable objects one can interact with?
These ideas were demonstrated as Brenner kindly took some extra time after the panel to show how a specific music software is working to do away with as much UI as possible, and making the content itself the UI, using minimal menus with maximum interactivity.
Watch this video to see how Brenner and his teams are working to minimize menus that are clicked on to lead to another source, to the objects being the source.
“We don’t always get things right,” said Brenner, “We’re just exploring solutions.”
And, exploring they are.
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I can’t stand menus that just take you to another menu. I think things need to be more interactive, and they will be in the near future. Things are changing for the better and Lee Brenner is a smart guy for realizing that.
There needs to be more people like this who are willing to try and invent new things. There are tons of sites that are hard to navigate, but nobody wants to take the time to change things because once they found something that kind of worked they stuck with it.