Simpsons DVD Boxes And User Interface Design
Yesterday the long awaited Simpsons Season 4 DVD box (German release) arrived and I spend the evening watching some episodes. Great as usual. However, the user interface still sucks, and compared to the previous boxes, it has even become worse.
The user interface - which mainly is the menu - of Simpsons Seasons 1 to 3 was annoying, since you had to do two - clicks is not the right word - actions to watch an episode. First change to the episode's sub menu, than choose play. After the episode had finished, change back to main menu, choose next episode, change to submenu again, and so on...
This has changed for Season 4, and you are able to start episodes from the main menu right away.
While this seams a step forward, it indeed confuses more than it helps. This is because for all Simpson DVDs, developers decided to put anything else accept the episodes away from the main menu, namely the language selection. This is bad, since depending on our mood, me and my wife Andrea like to watch the Simpsons in German, while the default language still is English.
How do you do that? There is no menu item "Language Selection" on the main menu, like there is for every other DVD I know. Instead, you have to change to the Extra section of an episode. That's where you can change the language. Note that this change is a system wide setting, although it is located in an episode's sub menu. This leads to users (Andrea in this special case) setting the languange for each and every episode, resulting in actual five actions beeing performed to watch an episode: Go to episode sub menu, open language sub sub menu, select German, return, play episode.
Clearly a case of very bad user interface design.
Now why does the decision to place a direct link to playing the epsiodes makes things even worse? Because it misleads you easily. As a user, what you most considerably want to do is to watch an epsiode. The main menu offers you the episodes and the extra sections for each episode. What you're gonna select? Right, the episode. Oops, it's English.
The moral: if you design bad user interfaces, it is better to offer the user just one choice.
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