By: Rico Mossesgeld

Rico Mossesgeld — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 06:26:55 +0000

Exactly. And I’m sure there’s a good balance between practicality and the ability to show what’s happening to the audience.

By: Rick Zarr

Rick Zarr — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 22:45:23 +0000

It is obvious that the artists of Star Trek had no intent on creating a usable computer interface. This is true of most sci-fi movies. It takes an amazing amount of concerted effort by engineers, psychologists, human (or otherwise) interface designers and computer systems people to come up with a great interface. As far as re-configurable user interfaces that allow the user to redefine how it works, we have those today – although not a clean looking as the “Star Trek TNG or Voyager” UIs. I study energy consumption of systems and the UI makes a difference. A poor UI will cause delays and slow a person’s ability to interface with a machine (a bad thing during a battle with another star ship). Given real engineers at the task, I’m sure the TNG UI could be amazingly simplified and self explanatory.

By: John

John — Tue, 05 May 2009 22:55:48 +0000

Nice pictures, but the article is very light on any discussion of *why* the Star Trek UIs are unusable. A more in-depth article would be much more interesting.

Comments on: Why Star Trek’s User-Interfaces Suck

By: Rico Mossesgeld

By: Rick Zarr

By: John