Wednesday, April 14, 2010

A word on design and Star Wars

During the vacation my wife and I enjoyed watching two Star Wars movies. First off, renaming or reversioning them from 1 and 3 to episode IV and episode VI is so IBM with renaming, rebranding, and confusing customers (take that, marketing!).

What got me thinking most during the movies was the design and "user interface". In order to interact with a powerful droid like R2-D2 they needed a translator like C-3PO to turn beeps back into a human language (or something understandable). This looked like many of today's products where the service guy is needed too often to turn cryptic (or non-existing) messages into something customers can make sense of.

Anyway, I am looking forward to the next DVD night...