Under Movies, you could see everything that was playing that week, read reviews, and check local theaters and showtimes. Ok, there are lots of sites and services that let you do those things on a mobile phone or smartphone now. Here’s the part I really miss – I could easily save any of the movies to “My List” and then, when I wanted to go see something, instead of having to search for it, or sort through everything currently playing in theaters, I just looked at My List and asked myself “What do I feel like seeing today?”

When I watched a movie, I would deselect it. If I didn’t get around to seeing it and it left theaters, it would automatically drop off the list. Very convenient. Each week, I’d sync my Palm to the computer (or sync it wirelessly, once I had the Treo) and the showtimes would update, and new listings would be added.

Why do all the current movie showtime services out there assume that I know exactly what I want to see and am willing to search for it every time?  Is it because most theaters in the US are playing the same half dozen movies on every screen? Is this problem I’m having unique to cinephiles in NYC?

I’ve spent several hours this evening looking for a mobile app – or even a mobile-enabled website – that will let me do this. None of the apps I found let me save movies. Of the sites I’ve looked at that have showtimes, a couple of them let you save movies to a list, but they have a lot of problems. Here are the two I tried.

Movieweb

On the plus side

• They have a very handy list of New Releases which you can view by week or month, going backwards or forwards from the current date. It even includes a lot of obscure movies, not just the mainstream ones.

On the downside

• It’s an awkward, multistep process to add a movie to your list. You have to go to the movie detail page, find and then click the button that says “add to my list”, and then select which list you want to add it to.
• The list doesn’t have any indication of the release dates or of whether movies are still in theaters, so there’s no distinction between current movies, upcoming movies, and movies whose runs are already over. You’d have to manually maintain that yourself.
• There’s no mobile version of the site, so on my phone’s web browser I had to scroll through tons of navigation, and the thumbnail image that accompanies each movie on the list makes it impossible to see more than one item at a time – not a quality I’m looking for in a list.
• The “showtimes and tickets” functionality of the site is not working. There’s a message when you go that page that says “This section is down for the moment being.” Aside from the fact that they made up a phrase, there’s no indication how long this condition may last. It simply states that they’re “upgrading the system for a more feature rich experience.”
• It’s possible to make an RSS feed of the list, so I briefly toyed with the idea of making the list, subscribing to the RSS feed of the list, and then looking at that on my phone… and then I realized that this is so inconvenient, it’s not worth the trouble, especially when after choosing a movie from your list, you’d then have to go to a separate website to find out where and when it’s playing.

Yahoo! Movies

On the plus side:

• I already had a Yahoo login, so it was easy to try it out without signing up for yet another service. 
• The lists you create include a column for status, which let you know if each movie is currently in theaters. 
• Clicking on the movie name takes you to a detail page which includes showtimes and, depending on the theater, the ability to buy tickets.

On the downside:

• While big movies with a designed page, like Angels & Demons, have a button that says “Add to My Movies”, most of the movies don’t have any way to add them from the detail page. So, you can’t just add movies while browsing around, you have to go to the list page and search for the movie there. (Confusingly enough, they do have an “Add to queue” button, which takes you to Blockbuster, where you’re asked to create another account).
• Whether you select one of the big movies from the detail page, or go to your list and search for a title, it’s still an awkward, multistep process, and you don’t end up on the list page when you’re done, so you have to find your way back if you want to actually see the list you’ve made.
• Yahoo! Movies does have a mobile version, but it’s so stripped down, it doesn’t let you see “complicated” features like the list you painstakingly made on their website. So, you can look at the list on a computer but not, you know, when you’re outside, where the movie theaters are!

Is it too much to ask for a mobile service that lets me easily manage a list of movies I want to see that are playing in my city? If anyone knows of an app or mobile-friendly site where I can perform this simple task, please let me know!

Now, I’m not going to name any names, but I think the people that forwarded this should be kind of ashamed. Because if you think about this for a moment, there are basically three options of what could happen when you forward this:

1. Nothing at all happens. You’ve just forward a semi-pornographic image to all your friends and colleagues.
2. Something mildly unexpected happens, and it is also pornographic. I hope it was exciting enough that it was worth having shared it, indiscriminately, will all your friends and colleagues!
3. Haven’t you seen Japanese horror movies? Or even a remake? Or even just a trailer for a remake of a Japanese horror movie? Do you really hate your friends and colleagues so much that you want them all to be killed by a demonic pornographic funwall message???

To be fair, I’ve also seen some indications that FunWall was somehow tricking people into inadvertently forwarded messages, so perhaps I should cut my contacts some slack. Who knows, maybe I even sent it out myself, without realizing it! That doesn’t really explain the people that sent it multiple times, though.

I’ve now removed that FunWall application and blocked it. There’s no real benefit to it, and there’s too great a risk of accidentally sending people something I didn’t even want to see in the first place.

Unfortunately, they couldn’t leave well enough alone. There are these user generated quizzes you can take, and when you’re done, before you’ve seen your results, it invites you to select up to 20 friends and challenge them to take the quiz too. I never understood this – why would I want to challenge my friends to beat my score before I’ve even seen what my score is? Well, now they’ve quietly added an adorable little “opt out” right above the submit button, like so: 

Of course, one of the first times I saw it, I neglected to deselect it.  So, the app sent a notification to 40 random friends, challenging them to beat my abysmal score of 60% on some ridiculous quiz about car logos!* Many of these could be people who don’t even use this particular Facebook app. Most of them are not people I would normally choose to “challenge” to a quiz. And none of them are people who I want to boast to about my ignorance of car logos!

So, while I originally thought the app was making changes to demonstrate more integrity, I now think it was just a way to get us to let our guards down while they came up with new methods of tricking us into partaking in their viral campaign for total Facebook domination. Judging from a quick survey of the people I inadvertanly spammed with my announcement of logo ignorance, it was already working. Damn.

*By the way, though I failed to recognize the logo for Subaru, I did recognize the logo for Skoda – so, I guess I’m kind of proud of that, anyway.

One of the apps that, in a general sense, I actually like is an app that lets me rate and review movies, share my opinions on films, and read about the opinions of others. It includes a “Movie Compatibility Test” which tells me how close my taste is to my buddies’, based on comparing our ratings for some 50-odd movies. It alerts me every time one of my friends has taken the quiz, so I can go check how well we matched up. I love movies, and all this sounds pretty cool. The problem is…

Every time I want to see the results of someone’s test – no matter if it’s the first time I’ve checked, or I’ve seen the results dozens of times already – it makes me go through this screen which is designed to get me to invite more friends to take the quiz (and thus sign up for the app). If I’m being generous, I’d say this design is trying to coerce, but more often I think it’s designed to trick.

The main thing I want to accomplish when I come to this page is to see the results of someone’s test. After all, that’s what the link I clicked on to get here promised. This page has pre-selected some people that it will invite, if I click on either of the buttons that provide the most obvious path to seeing the results – the buttons that say “Continue to Results.” It is possible to see the results without inviting more people, if you click on the small, subtle link that says “Skip to Results,” up in the right hand corner. Did you see it? It doesn’t even really look much like a link. It’s even less noticeable when you see it in the context of the whole page.

It takes constant vigilance to use this feature of the app without accidentally inviting your friends to subscribe. Since it’s a feature that will definitely inspire return visits, you have to be paying close attention every time. If you feel in the least bit distracted, tired, or impatient, there’s a good chance that you’ll be so focused on your goal of seeing the results that you’ll just click on the most obvious call-to-action, and before you know it you’ve spammed a bunch of your friends. This happened to me the other day, even though I was already a long-time user of the app.

As an added bonus, since it randomly selects the subset of contacts to invite, I had no way of knowing who I had spammed. A couple people mentioned it to me that day, though, which spurred some discussions of the sneaky design that inspired this behavior. This kind of thing is of particular interest among my colleagues, because we spend pretty much all of our time thinking about usability, information architecture, and user-centered design. So, of course we have strong feelings about designs that seem to wield conventions of usability against us like a weapon. These kinds of practices bring the concept of “viral media” back to its infectious roots.

In one conversation with a coworker, I referred to this deliberate use of user experience to manipulate users as “disinformation architecture.” He quickly found a blog with that name, but unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with this idea (so I’m not going to link to it here). I think the author of that blog just thought it was an edgy-sounding name for a blog. That doesn’t mean I can’t write about it here, though. So, I’m going to call out disinformation architecture where I see it. Because it really bugs the crap out of me.

Helvetica was created in the late ’50s. At the time it solved many graphic design problems and it sort of took the modern world by storm. Later, there was some post-modern backlash, but the font was already so ubiquitous, there was no going back. The film depicted the views and feelings of many prominent designers, and offered a wide range of perspectives on the font.

The font’s supporters said it was successful because it was clean, straightforward, easy-to-read,  modern, uniform, democratic, human, friendly, efficient, neutral, unbiased, global, trustworthy, and authoritative. Plus, it’s flexilble. Essentially, you can use it in different ways and in a wide variety of contexts to give it any number of different connotations, and evoke a broad range of responses.

It’s detractors accused the font of being corporate, soulless, dull, oppressive, bland, imperialistic, conformist, and too ubiquitous. Everything from having no personality to being actually evil! David Carson, graphic designer and creator of Raygun magazine, commented that “legibility does not equal communication.”

Both sides had really good points. I suppose the question is: what are you trying to communicate, and how does that communication take form? Typography is like the textual equivalent of body language. One person can gesticulate wildly as they tell you a story, and that can augment the story being told, or it could just be distracting. Another person can sit calmly and tell you something in confident, even tones. This may give their words more credibility and authority, or they may be hiding something under that facade.