I can’t believe how useless — pretty but useless — most DVD menus are, and Don Norman, guest columnist on Alertbox, agrees with me in his (year-old) column, DVD Menu Design:
Designers of DVDs have failed to profit from the lessons of previous media: Computer software, Internet web pages, and even WAP phones. As a result, the DVD menu structure is getting more and more baroque, less and less usable, less pleasurable, less effective.
I thought I had it bad navigating through multiple menus just to get to the next episode of Buffy:
Memento, a fascinating movie, has a website-like presentation, filled with hidden words and hyperjumps to tantalizingly vague images that move about the screen. In theory, this is sophisticated hypertext, exploring the story subtleties in a non-linear fashion that mirrors the time distortion of the film. But the treatment does not live up to the theory. First, the film is actually linear, so the text fights the story it is trying to enhance. Didn’t the designer listen to the interview with the director on the very same DVD disk? Yes, the film rearranges time, linearly, in reverse (well, almost). The director carefully points out in the interview that you cannot delete or rearrange any section without destroying the entire whole. In other words, the film — unlike the commentary — is fixed in structure.
When I rented Memento, I didn’t explore the DVD — in part because we were visiting family, and they hated it. Anyway, this next bit applies to DVDs in general:
But even if you think that this is not a flaw, that a commentary can differ from the movie, the more serious flaw is that hypertext just doesn’t work on a DVD. The DVD is slow, not like a desktop PC. Finding another section on the disk takes time — measured in seconds — and so although the viewer at first marvels at the cleverness of the site, it does not take long for the marvel to deteriorate to disenchantment. “Do we have to keep going through this?” my family asked me when I patiently tried exploring the text. “Nope,” I answered, and with relief went back to the main menu.