S60 Open to new features

Over at the S60 Multimedia Blog, Oren mentioned a music video filmed entirely with an S60. Apparently there’s also a Boston University class in mobile filmmaking. This reminded me of something I’ve considered from time to time, without really getting anywhere with the idea: software design is like filmmaking.

At least the two are alike in many ways. Film is a stream of events. Although each set and situation is important, you want to think mostly about that stream rather than getting stuck in just one frame. Software UI is like that too. You’re designing a stream of possible experiences for users. You can get stuck in just one “frame” here, too — for instance, I think a lot about the Options menu and its various states and constituent items. It’s possible to get stuck on a set of items and fruitlessly struggle to get it “just right”. But some states and items just don’t make a lot of sense if the user hasn’t proceeded through a stream of events to get there.

A big thing to avoid, in UI design, is arriving at a state or a “scene” out of sequence. It’s confusing if “Save Download” appears as an option before there’s a download to save. Similarly, in a movie, every scene has to proceed from the previous scene and to the next scene. When the hero suddenly pulls out a revolver he never seemed to have before, and we never saw him get it from somewhere, it gets pretty difficult to suspend our disbelief. In short, we stop believing the movie.

UI design and filmmaking even have some tools in common: storyboards, scripts, and the like. Even walkthroughs. And both a film and a browsing session have a beginning, a middle, and an end. In film, there’s more closure in a literary sense. In browsing, there’s more (or can be more) of a concrete outcome. You find the information you want, for example.

The problem, for me, is that while this is a fascinating juxtaposition of two creative processes, I’ve never been able to really glean anything useful from it. If I think of browsing sessions as films, it just doesn’t seem to help me design the browser UI any better. It hasn’t made my amateur movies any better, either.

Is it me? Am I missing something crucial? Or is this just another interesting comparison on the order of “An Ogre is like an onion“?