To be sure, these hollywood formulations are male-centric.

After all, in a film, any computer interface must be immediately recognizable and understandable to people seeing it for between a few…

To be sure, these hollywood formulations are male-centric. But, to suggest that those aspects will translate is to assume that it’ll even work. The requirements of hollywood UX are very different from real UX, and this is most extreme with conversational interfaces — to the point that the kinds of interfaces that work in films do not work IRL and vice versa.

After all, in a film, any computer interface must be immediately recognizable and understandable to people seeing it for between a few seconds and a few minutes. A real computer interface, on the other hand, can be initially a bit confusing if that makes it more usable in the long run. To be more concrete: a film’s UI must have bright colors and a giant font and only clearly show plot- relevant information (otherwise the viewers wouldn’t know where to look), while a real UI needs to show whatever information the user might find useful (life has no plot) and giant fonts and bright colors would annoy long-term users. This kind of problem extends out to conversational interfaces in films, which are driven by exposition and spectacle. People in films don’t even talk to each other the same way as they do in real life, because dialogue is optimized for showing off plot and character rather than engaging in the kind of social game-playing that dominates real dialogue.

A real conversational interface ideally resembles the interaction between two technical professionals: in other words, over time a shortened and optimized jargon is developed for more efficient communication, so that the kind of conversation that begins looking like an interaction between strangers eventually ends up resembling a command line interface.

A conversational interface based on mimicing conversational interfaces from movies won’t support the patriarchy, because it will be almost completely useless — worse in all ways than a simpler system based on individual commands. Anyone who uses such an interface is merely screwing themselves over.

By John Ohno on January 19, 2016.

[Canonical link](https://medium.com/@enkiv2/to-be-sure-these-hollywood- formulations-are-male-centric-5dd91873b89d)

Exported from Medium on September 18, 2020.