The interaction designer obviously thought that having a pointer was, well, a waste, so on every page of the menu, you had four options, and you followed whichever one was in the direction you pointed. Bad idea. If you only have four options on each page, you need far too many page transitions to get to things like scene access.
But it gets worse. I wanted to use the "find a song" feature so I could watch "Goodbye, Blue Sky", which has pretty damn cool animation behind it. The options on "find a song" are numbered. Only numbered. So I have to guess totally out of the blue which track it is. Even when you dig right to the bottom of the menu and you've got the individual songs to choose from, they're still just numbered. Suck suck suck.
Other pet peeves:
- Disabling fast-forward on the advertising for the distributor. Why do they do that? Do they think that anyone outside the industry cares which studio made a film any more? Maybe back in the 30's, when the studios had their own stables of actors and writers, it meant something that this was a Universal film, or whatever, but now it's totally irrelevant, and forcing me to sit through their little animations every time I put the disk in is totally stupid
- Similarly, some disks I have disable things like rewind or frame-by-frame advance. Why? What possible benefit is it to the DVD maker that I can't play the thing slowly in reverse if I want to?
- Animations when going between menus. When I click a button, it's because I want to get somewhere, not because I want to see a five second clip from a movie I'm already going to watch.
- Screwing up the remote control. On my PS2, if I click one button, it switches between soundtracks. If I click another button, it toggles subtitles. This is useful. I can do things like be listening to the commentary, want to hear what's going on behind them, rewind a bit, change to the english track, then change back to the commentary afterwards. On some DVDs, I know they have subtitles and multiple audio tracks, but when I press the button, I get a message saying that I'm not allowed. So I have to go back to the annoying menu and all its animated transitions, and lose my spot in the movie if I want to change. Thanks.
- If you're listing the "special features" on the DVD cover, scene-by-scene access and the "theatrical trailer" don't count.
- DVD menus with a looping soundtrack. After the movie finishes, I'm forced to move around and find the TV remote to turn the sound off, because some idiot has programmed a looping 15 seconds of "atmosphere".
- Am I the only person who thinks that when you put a DVD in the drive and press "play", it should play the main feature by default, and only go to the menu if you hit the menu button? Chances are, if I put a movie in, I want to watch the movie, right?
The silly thing is, there's absolutely no way to put commercial pressure on the distributors to improve the interface. It's not like the web, where if a site's interface sucks, you can to go another site. The selling point of the DVD is the movie that's on it, and when it comes to that, there's no competition - if I want to buy Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, I can't say "No, I'll buy the one where you don't have a minute of sword-fighting to watch just to get from the main menu to the sound menu"
Hopefully, one day, common sense will prevail, and the idiot graphic designers who tend to take over everything will be kicked out in favour of someone who actually will create something we want to use, rather than dreading.
