Using Film Cutting Techniques in Interface Design

It has been suggested that computer interfaces could be made more usable if their designers utilized cinematography techniques, which have evolved to guide the viewer through a narrative despite frequent discontinuities in the presented scene (i.e., cuts between shots). Because of differences between the domains of film and interface design, it is not straightforward to understand how such techniques can be transferred. May and Barnard (1995) argued that a psychological model of watching film could support such a transference. This article presents an extended account of this model, which allows identification of the practice of collocation of objects of interest in the same screen position before and after a cut. To verify that filmmakers do, in fact, use such techniques successfully, eye movements were measured while participants watched the entirety of a commercially HUMAN–COMPUTER INTERACTION, 2003, Volume 18, pp. 325–372 Copyright © 2003, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Jon May is a psychologist with an interest in the application of unified models of cognition to perception and emotion, particularly with regard to the effects of task and context; he is a senior lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of Sheffield. Michael Dean is a psychologist who has researched the mental representations that give rise to perceptual and memory effects in object perception; he is now working as a speech therapist. Philip Barnard is a psychologist with an interest in theories of mental architecture and their application to complex tasks, emotion, and a range of psychopathologies; he is on the staff of the Medical Research Council’s Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit. released motion picture, in its original theatrical format. For each of 10 classes of cut, predictions were made about the use of collocation. Peaks in eye movements between 160 and 280 msec after the cut were detected for 6 of the 10 classes, and results were broadly in line with collocation predictions, with two exceptions. It is concluded that filmmakers do successfully use collocation when cutting in and out from a detail, following the motion of an actor or object, and in showing the result of an action. The results are used to make concrete recommendations for interface designers from the theoretical analysis of film comprehension. 1. FILM AND COMPUTER INTERFACE DESIGN This article argues that computer interface design can benefit from aspects of filmmakers’ craft knowledge, but that identifying which aspects are beneficial, and how they can be applied, is not straightforward. To do so, we develop a general cognitive model of the perception of dynamically changing scenes, using examples from filmmaking, which emphasizes the need to present visual information in a manner that allows the all-important primary task (in film, narrative comprehension; in human–computer interaction [HCI], achieving task goals) to be processed without interruption by secondary tasks created by the need to repeatedly reorient to a changing visual scene. To test the assumption that this practice is actually successfully employed by filmmakers, we present eye-movement data collected from volunteers watching a commercial film. We illustrate the way that this par326 MAY, DEAN, BARNARD