Grate Expectations
I’d never consider myself to be a great movie buff—I don’t see all that many movies. However, I do get really excited about a small number of movies, which elicit strange behaviors such as attending midnight premieres. These tend to be in the genres of fantasy and science fiction, including the likes of Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings. For such movies, I not only enjoy the films themselves, but learning about the making of the films. I’m very interested in how the story is conceived, the storyboarding process, the concept art, costume design, set design, location scouting, sound design, score composition—I find it all quite fascinating. As you can imagine, then, I appreciate a DVD with quality special features. I’ll go ahead and peg the geek meter by admitting to watching all four commentaries on each of the three extended cuts of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
I’ve enjoyed the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. They aren’t all-time favorites, but I like them enough to acquire the DVDs. The first two movies included commentaries by the screenwriters, Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, which I found to be quite illuminating. The Dead Man’s Chest plot becomes quite intricate, only deepening in the third film. I enjoyed listening to Ted and Terry talk about their process, their inspirations, and their creative breakthroughs. I’ve very much been looking forward to their discussions about wrapping up the series. In fact, I would have to say that I’ve been more anxiously awaiting the commentary than the chance to see the movie again.
Today I received the 2-disc special edition as a slightly early birthday present only to find that there is no commentary whatsoever. I’m very disappointed.
This is a round-about way of illustrating the negative effects of not meeting the expectations of your audience. There are times that I have been forced to compromise my user interface designs to meet technical or time constraints, knowing full well that the resulting application is not going to behave as the user expects, or will be missing something that they expect to be there. Meeting or, better yet, exceeding expectations is a key part of creating a good user experience.