origins of the cinematic user experience

March 15, 2008

I’ve rallied a few designers at Laszlo to start a new weblog about the Cinematic Interface. The first time I ever heard software described as cinematic was David Temkin who coined the term the “cinematic user experience.” Brenda Laurel wrote about computer software as theater, but David took the metaphor one step farther. I cornered him a few weeks ago to ask him about the origins of the term, and posted the interview. Here’s a snippet:

We didn’t want to say rich media. Rich media is tainted. It makes you think you are going to get some movies. The word “rich” is also tainted. You say rich and you think you are going to get some chocolately desserts that are heavy and expensive – 5MB downloads of chocolately desserts. Who wants that? I want my application.

Cinematic user experience conveys first of all that you aren’t just watching you are interacting – the “user experience” part of it. We thought cinematic was an intriguing term, that had a non-techie spin to it. It was something that when non-techies saw it, they instantly understood this is a completely different type of product category and yet industry insiders would look at it and say things are moving on the screen, maybe you have a different technical architecture…

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