The Problem with DVDs

I own quite a few DVDs. I also own quite a few CDs. Both look quite similar, but when you put them in the player, you get very different behaviors. When you put a CD into a CD player, it plays music. This seems fairly reasonable, because there isn’t much else you can do with a CD unless you rip it to a computer’s hard disk (in which case, you are no longer dealing with the CD directly).

When you put the DVD into a DVD player, the standard behavior is less well-defined. Some of the older DVDs I own—from the era where things like subtitles and surround sound were listed as "special features"—play the film. Some slightly newer ones play some kind of flashy introduction (which looked dated within a year of release) and then go to the menu. The newest ones tell me that copyright infringement is illegal, suggest a load of other films I might want to buy, and then go to the menu.

The first thing to notice about this insertion behavior is the lack of consistency. This is more the fault of the DVD standard than the individual discs. No single behavior was mandated, so individual studios picked their own favorite. A user who puts a new DVD in the player has no way of knowing what to expect when they press Play.

The second thing to notice is that, as studios became more familiar with the capabilities of the format, the user experience deteriorated. Think for a second about what the user wants to do when he inserts a DVD into a player. Most of the time, he wants to watch the film. With old VHS cassettes, this was about the only thing you could do, so it was the default behavior. With early DVDs, the same was true. At some point along the line, the behavior changed to going to the menu.

Why is going to the menu such a bad initial behavior? For two reasons:

• Any action requires a button to press. If all you wanted to do was watch the movie, then you are still required to press the "yes, I actually did put this film in my player in order to watch the film" button.
• Every single DVD remote has a Menu button. You can always get to the menu in a single button press. Because you start on the menu, however, the selected option has to be "Play Film," because this is what the user almost always wants to do. If the movie started playing automatically, then the default option in the menu could be to play special features.

By making this small change, we turn playing the film from a one-button action into a zero-button action, but we don’t make accessing the special features any harder. Now, getting the special features requires you to press Menu, then Enter, where previously it required you to press Down (or Across, depending on the menu layout) and then Enter. Out most common action is easier, and our alternative action is less hard.

I am going to ignore sound and language selection options in the menu; they shouldn’t even be there because the DVD specification requires audio and subtitle language to be configurable in the player. The disc should just read them from the player, not require the user to make the same choice every time.

Applications Have Startup Problems, Too

This kind of behavior is directly mirrored in the software world. What happens when you launch an application? Taking document-based applications as a particular subset, the most common thing you are going to want to do is create a new document, and some default to this. An example of one that doesn’t is Apple’s Keynote.

When you start Keynote, you are given a dialog box asking you to select a theme. It is not obvious why this is here; Keynote stores each slide’s structure, so it is easy to change the theme after creating the presentation. Why not just default to the last, or most commonly used, theme? After you select one, there is even a drop-down list in the toolbar allowing you to change it.

Another thing to notice about this dialogue is that it gives you the option of opening an existing file. Why is this here? It is no easier to click on it that to go to the Open option in the File menu. In fact it’s harder, because the File menu is always in the same place on the screen while the Keynote window moves around, and there is always the Command-Option shortcut for the menu. If it’s a recently modified presentation, it will be in the File, Open Recent submenu, which is even easier than going through this menu.

I don’t want to single Keynote out particularly. A lot of applications are guilty of this behavior. When you design an application, always try to think of what the user will want to do most of the time, and default to this. Once you’ve got that working, ensure that it’s easy to do non-standard things. If you’re doing public beta releases, you might consider having your beta record what the most common actions are, so you are sure you aren’t a special case.