DVD Authoring

When it comes to ease of use, complexity is not a disease

2006-05-30T17:57:11-05:00

In working on web design and DVD authoring, we're constantly focusing on making the user interface easy to understand and use. Every job is different, with different goals to meet and limitations to accommodate. When it comes to complexity of functionality, these two media represent opposite ends of the poles: Drupal-powered websites have much complexity, while DVDs are incredibly simple. Yet optimizing usability of these two vastly different interactive formats can be very challenging. This is because complexity in itself is not a barrier to ease of use. Complexity is not a disease.

Recently on his blog, Drupal founder Dries Buytaert wrote:

The Ockham's Razor Principle of Content Management Systems says that given two functionally equivalent content management systems, the simplest one will be chosen. It asserts that simplicity is preferred to complexity. As content management systems become more alike in terms of critical functionality, ease of use will become a key differentiator (rather then functionality).

In addition, web application frameworks like Ruby on Rails, whose goal is to develop applications with as little code as possible, are redefining the rules of how websites are built. For web application developers, ease of development will become a key differentiator.

Complexity is a disease.

Much as I hate to disagree with Dries, I truly do not believe that simplicity itself makes for "ease of use." Usability arises from many different principles, of which simplicity in the abstract hardly ranks.

Case in point: DVDs vs. Drupal-powered websites. DVDs can be aggravatingly unusable, despite their inherent architectural simplicity. On the other hand, websites powered by anything can be incredibly easy to use and understand, even without disabling rich and complex functionality.

To Dries' post, I responded, in part:

I'm not so sure that simpler is always better. Which is easier to drive: A BMW? or a prototype car that just has a joystick? The BMW, with steering wheel, pedals and gear shift, is much more complex in terms of user interface, but for most people it is also easier to use, despite the fact that the prototype vehicle with just a singular joystick is obviously a much simpler interface. Existing patterns of use always come into play.

In another example: A looping handle on a door you can only push open is bad design, no matter how simple it is. People will take a cue from the design and try to pull that door open. A push-latch bar on a door, on the other hand, is much more complex to design and manufacture, but it is infinitely easier for people to use. Very few people will try to pull open that door.

Complexity isn't a disease -- confusion is the disease. Complexity often leads to confusion, and that's a problem. But complexity in itself doesn't have to confuse. All you have to do is listen to a Beethoven symphony to hear the proof of that.

When it comes to making a website easy to use, we're always balancing principles such as affordance, accessibility, chunking, signal-to-noise ratio, forgiveness, feedback, the list goes on. The law of parsimony, which people call Ockham's Razor, is but one part of the picture -- and taken to its extreme, can lead to maddeningly unusable design.

One of the greatest appeals for me about Drupal is its inherent flexibility and capacity for very complex content management. The challenge for me, as a designer, is to make that complexity into something usable. Sometimes that means simplifying choices or function, but mostly I'm focusing on clarity and affordance. As new, more powerful functions and features are being added every day to the Drupal core and contribution repository, sometimes ease of use can slip away from us for a while. It's gratifying to read of Dries' interest in adding to the Drupal development process a real focus on ease of use -- especially since I do not believe Drupal has to lose any of its robust complexity in order to achieve this.

One of the very exciting developments to arise in last week's worldwide Drupal developers' conference call was discussion on revamping the entire theming architecture of Drupal, so that, eventually, all of the content presentation is called and handled by the theme. So far, much of our work in designing Drupal themes is in handling information that is pushed out from the CMS. Changing this paradigm into a pull mechanism can make for some exciting new ways we can develop user interfaces for Drupal-powered sites in the future.

Related and recommended: "Universal Principles of Design", by William Lidwell, Kritina Holden and Jill Butler (Rockport Publishers: 2003).

Looking back at 2005

2006-01-01T18:08:12-06:00

This past year has brought about many changes. Early in 2005, when we started up pingVision, Katherine and I had a clear vision of what we wanted to achieve in five years, ten years.... Those plans are still there, still in the works. But wasn't clear back then was how we ourselves would work our own ways down both the internet and television paths towards the inevitable convergence, when interactive television -- the medium combining the hyperlinking freedom of the web with the full-motion video of television -- becomes a reality.

The television path was fairly clear. DVD authoring was a natural choice, given its nascent interactivity (and the fact that our experience, equipment and training made it possible). The future of the DVD format is still uncertain, but once a format is settled, growth in the HD DVD area will explode, and give us the first glimpses of what new kinds of interactivity will be possible -- and, more important, will catch on with users. Count me as one who is really looking forward to NAB this coming year.

The internet path was less obvious to me. When we started the business, my experience with Drupal had been limited to five or six small websites. But as I was helping people configure their systems, and tweak designs here and there -- and as I got more familiar with Drupal and realized just how flexible and powerful a CMS it is -- the path began to take shape: design, configure and host Drupal- (and CivicSpace-) powered websites for clients ready to step up from static brochureware sites, simpler blogging tools or proprietary systems that had locked up their opportunities to improvise and expand.

What really added to the appeal of this approach for me was the Open Source nature of the Drupal project. I love the idea of community-built tools. I love the self-empowerment that results from truly owning one's own website code -- something you don't get with proprietary systems. As a lifelong entrepreneur, anything that helps empower people is exciting. Entrepreneurialism is all about self-motivated action, blazing one's own trail (even if following a well-marked map), and creating one's own enterprise. It's a self-empowering process. And the spirit of Open Source seems to capture that.

So Drupal it was. Now even though I had been creating websites for ten years, mostly for myself but sometimes for companies I worked for, getting under Drupal's hood was a bit daunting -- very much like the feeling I have opening the hood of my Outback with the intention of fixing something. With the car, I just close the hood and call the garage. But with Drupal, I dug in. And though I didn't get grease on my hands, I confess there were times when I felt I had mud in my brain. Drupal is an efficient, yet very complex, core package, with code mature enough that knowing (or learning) PHP is not quite enough.

Unlike my experiences with phpBB and Mambo, however, I've found the core to be rock solid. Rarely does an error in a contributed module do more than simply render that module ineffective. And that's a blessing. Because if your system remains up and running when dealing with a problem, there's much more opportunity, imho, to learn something from the fixing process. In the past year, that fixing process for me has mostly been a matter of filing or finding a bug report, and then reading and learning from the fixes provided by others. It's been a fruitful learning process, to the point where now I've been contributing php snippets to the effort. (This isn't to say that other CMSs like Mambo are inherently unstable. But my experience was that a buggy module in Mambo would take the entire system down. It all just seemed so ... brittle ... to me. A subjective take, fwiw.)

What has always surprised me about Drupal, though, is its flexibility. Whether you need a community network site, a business store site or an artist's showcase site, Drupal can be used as a robust and powerful core. I think a lot of people try Drupal without realizing that power and flexibility, and end up feeling overwhelmed, like someone looking for a Vespa ending up in the cockpit of a Lear jet. ("But how do I go?") A Drupal-powered site can be configured for very simple operation (such as a personal blog); it can be as easy as a scooter. But it's Drupal's capacity for complexity that appeals to me -- because the complexity is in possibilities. Drupal can seem complicated because there are so many ways to do so many different things; but it's the intersection of all the cleanly-coded variables that results in an astounding matrix of potential paths. I much prefer the world of possibilities with complexity over systems that have only one (usually quirky) way of doing something -- especially if I'm building a site for a client.

But I have to say, I feel the biggest blessing of the year when it comes to Drupal has been the Drupal community. The core developers, led by Dries Buytaert (who now has started his own blog), have been taking Drupal forward in great strides, and the developers of the contributed modules have brought some wonderful insight and innovation into the project, resulting in unexpected and often very exciting features and benefits. And it's only because of these developers, and the Drupal community itself, that I felt, and feel now all the more so, that investing our time and energy and resources in learning the workings of Drupal and becoming part of the Drupal community is worthwhile. Drupal is a solid investment for virtually any forward-looking website project.

2006 looks to be an exciting year. While wrapping up a major community website and a complex instructional DVD project many moons in the making, we enter the new year with a redesign for a popular blog and a re-branding and design for an organization doing some wonderful work in the non-profit world. What else the year holds for us, who can say? We'll find out when we make it happen.

Happy New Year!

What is DVD?

2005-06-17T17:56:01-05:00

What do those terms all mean?

There is a neat resource that answers questions about DVD technology and what the terms mean. Worth a look.

pingV does DVD menu design for Riverbend's "Made-Up"

2005-03-23T20:57:41-06:00

March 2005

pingVision has just completed work on the DVD menu design for Riverbend Entertainment's new release...

...starring Tony Shalhoub and Brooke Adams.

Highlights of the menu samples are viewable here as part of the pingV portfolio.

This project follows a web development contract pingVision completed for Riverbend, creating a custom theme of a CivicSpace implementation of their site. [Site launch TBA.]

CivicSpace is a specialized package of the Drupal CMS. pingV does custom theming, administration and installation of Drupal and CivicSpace implementations as part of its web development offerings.

DVD menu design for "Made-Up"

2005-03-23T16:00:53-06:00

Last week we completed some DVD menu design work for Riverbend Entertainment's upcoming release, "Made-Up" (starring Tony Shalhoub and Brooke Adams).

The main menu

The main menu was a motion menu. Because we had a beautiful video montage with which to work, this was perhaps the easiest part of the project. Our job here was simply to create the "buttons" and selector graphics.

Doing our work in Combustion, first we masked out an area with which to work -- the edges, and a lower-thirds area. Then we added a gaussian blur, a glow effect, a bit of desaturation, and played with the histogram a bit. We also added a touch of blur and glow to the overall image.

This way the text pops against the diffused background, while we still get a nice clear view of the action in the center of the frame.

Scene selections menus

Here are two of the six menus we did for the chapter/scene selections.

This first one is actually the last menu for the chapter selections. It proved to be a bit of a challenge because we had five chapter selections instead of the four offered on each of the other chapter menus -- this in addition to the menu selections listed down the left side of the screen.

I liked this one mainly because of the background photo. The approach we undertook for this entire project was to use the production value in the film itself. In "Made-Up," this meant using the actors themselves. The film really has a wonderful amiable atmosphere, and we tried to capture that in the stills we used for the menus.

On all the chapter selections menus, we de-emphasized the background by using a combination of glows and desaturation. This allowed the smaller stills representing the chapters themselves to pop out.

The extras menu

Since Tony Shalhoub directed "Made-Up," we thought it made obvious sense to use a shot of him while doing some "directing work" ... like standing at a video tap monitor.

Initially we had tried a bit of a "zip zoom" effect on this shot, to make it look like we were zooming rapidly in on him, but the effect was too distracting so we abandoned it. Instead we opted for a bit of a diffuse glow, radial blur and some burning of the background where it threatened to compete with the text.

The subtitles menu

This was one of my favorite stills from the entire movie. We used this one for the subtitles menu because the photo itself seemed to ask, What are they saying? Since the composition seemed to fit the text layout so well, we opted not to step on the photo so much.

It's always fun to work on good material

Over the years, I've worked on some real cinematic dogs. Producing a quality trailer or one-sheet for a stinker of a movie can be like trying to draw blood from a stone. Ironically it can be the most difficult and painful with an independent movie that strives to break out of the mold, but simply does not work. Then, if you worked on the picture, your heart aches over the missed opportunities; if you're doing the marketing, you're often left puzzled as to how to position the film. On the other hand, the easiest jobs can be the genre pieces. There it's clear what the movie needs, and it's downright obvious how to sell it. However, there's only so much genre you can take. (There's a good reason why the big action pictures need real "stars" -- the stars make the forumula watchable, maybe even enjoyable.)

"Made-Up" breaks all the conventions, and is all the more delightful for it. Having been able to work on this project -- even in such a tangential way as doing design work for the DVD menus -- has put a nice gloss on the first major project for this start-up company.

This was a last-minute job that we undertook on short notice when Riverbend, unhappy with the menu designs they were getting from the graphic designer they had retained, turned to us. Unfortunately for us, our work will go uncredited as the "DVD credits" roll already had been produced.