Props be unto us

33% of readers like that this is content that can’t be found anywhere else.

20% like learning more about interfaces in their favorite shows.

10% like how it sharpens their thinking around interaction design.

20% of people added a response of “all of the above” (the many slices) which is just awesome.

Your wish list

Many people asked for more frequent posts, and I wholly agree, but can’t do much about it. This is a labor of love, not a job, and I’m fitting it in to my schedule amongst work, marketing my new book, working on new stuff, and being a dad. (Wait. You know that I see maybe $5/month from this, right?)

I’d put the amount of work to review an average movie at 60 hours of work between screen cap, writing, formatting, and social medializing. The only chance I have of upping the frequency is to have more time (unlikely) or more authors, and while I have worked with a great team of them, none of them seem to have the time to do more than they already are/have. So, yeah, once/week is about as much as I can wrangle. Glad to know there’s demand?

More advice

Similarly to frequency, there was interest in more advice on which shows to watch. I’m going to presume that’s the report cards at the end of each review. That’s obviously tied to frequency of posts, so is similarly constrained.

More sub-genres

There was interest in more sub-genres (like anime, horror-sci-fi, or comedy) and I’m down for that. I had one author who had expressed interest in starting to cover B-movies, which I loved, but he wound up not having the time. I’ll use the requested shows as an indicator of which sub-genres.

Note though that I don’t feel especially equipped to review anime. (I took a risk with Ghost in the Shell. Anime fans: Did it work?) I feel that to do it right takes some background knowledge of the genre as a whole, the common tropes, sometimes the language, and the culture from which it emerged, and I’m lacking on all those fronts. 🙁 I have an author who is better equipped, but she’s also strapped for spare time. I’ll hit her up and see if she’s interested in going in again on some of the requested shows.

More authors

There were 8% who were expressed interested in different authors. I’m down for having more voices to bring more content and different perspectives to the site. Which leads us to…

Your opportunity/general shout-out

This and nearly all of the above problems could be solved with more contributors, let me put this out there: I am always looking for more authors with whom to collaborate and get more content. It’s not easy (here is the outline of the amount of work it takes) and my time to collaborate/be a thought partner/editor is constrained, but my authors do report it’s fun and rewarding. So, hit me up: chris [at] scifiinterfaces.com

Shows

There was a clear winner in the wish list for new reviews.

• The Expanse (5)
• Star Trek (3) (Since this was asked before Discovery, I presume this means the whole franchise, not just the new one)
• District 9 (2), robot HUD and ship controls
• Babylon 5 (2)
• Westworld (2) (1 request said particularly as it relates to game design)

Great. A nice list. Some problems with it though.

The Problem of TV Shows

As much work as reviewing movies is, reviewing television shows is at least an order of magnitude more than that. (Black Mirror and similar anthology shows are an exception. Except as of the latest season finale we get that it’s a single diegesis which only goes to prove the point…)

Take an example from Star Trek. To review just one technology from the show thoroughly/confidently across the entire franchise (and here I have to make a shout-out to Quora author Cliff Gilley on this post), I have to watch 546 hours hours of television and movies. That’s 23 days straight without sleeping. Dedicated to viewing, understanding, screen capping as I go, cataloging, thinking about rules and exceptions. Maybe an AI could do it. But I ain’t AI. I did it for combadges, but that was greatly aided by the Memory Alpha wiki, which helped me filter out the shows in which the technology isn’t. Not all shows have that awesome of a wiki behind it.

This doesn’t mean I’m against reviewing TV shows on principle, but holy cow is it daunting when I think of the number of movies I could get reviewed in that same amount of time.

In addition to the daunting work, I usually like to wait for a series to be completed before I attempt to review the interfaces. That’s partly so I don’t have to go back and update analyses to incorporate new interactions that appear later, or refer to interfaces by the when they appear. A post named Teleporter Interface (2015–2017) doesn’t exactly roll across the tongue, keyboard, or the eyes.

I’ve made some exceptions. I have the first drafts of reviews for Firefly around here someplace since I wrote the book, and I just need to wrap up the three ongoing properties before I want to revisit those for publication. And I didn’t wait for the Marvel Cinematic Universe to be complete before I started reviewing those movies, so exceptions can be made, I just have to have really good reasons to break the “rules.”

Those particular shows

So with that in mind, I have seen season one of The Expanse. I intend to go back and watch the next seasons. But given the cliff hanger at the end of season 1, I really feel I ought to let that one finish before I review.

With the new trailer for Season 2 of Westworld out, I suspect I should wait for that one, too, though I’m really itching to review that one.

And holy shit Star Trek. Unless I stick to the movies, I could spend the rest of my life reviewing those shows alone, and I’m just not up for it yet. If you want to help start, again: Hit me up.

I loved District 9 and got to include a few of the interfaces for the book, so I have a leg up on that one. Quite possible.

There were a bunch of fun one-off requests as well. Here they are, with any notes by me in [brackets].

• Continuum

• Destination Moon [a fun older movie! Love it.]

• Doctor Who [I want to do this especially given the new Doctor, but it has decades of material for me to review. I was last a regular watcher when the Doctor wore a striped scarf (!)]

• Person of Interest (particularly seeing all the “inputs” the machine uses and the limited “outputs”) [Oh man me, too. Especially since it ties in to my interest in AI and I loved this show. They had done their homework on ASI and the show was fun and compelling to boot. And the show is over. So I’m down.]

• Battlestar Galactica (reboot) The mini-series is done.

• Blakes 7

• Contact [So few interfaces in this one it might be pretty easy.]

• Continuum

• Dark Star [Oh man. This one would be tough and fun. but awesome.]

• Edge of Tomorrow

• Guardians of the Galaxy 1 & 2 [These are pretty likely since they’re in the MCU and that’s a vein I’m currently mining.]

• Gunbusters

• Killjoys

• The Last Starfighter [Near and dear to my heart.]

• Lexx

• Moon [Great, constrained interface design in this.]

• Red Dwarf

• Star Trek The Motion Picture (specifically the bridge and icon system)

• Stargate

• Starship Operators

To whoever listed Jurassic Park, it’s already done! Same with The Fifth Element. Also I’m not going to review Ender’s Game because Card is such a toxic asshole I don’t even want to indirectly reward him.

If you’re reading this and you think you’d want to review one or more of these, please let me know.

Next up: I begin providing responses to some one-off comments and suggestions.

Most readers see the site as a fun distraction, but nearly a third use it as inspiration for their design or sci-fi work. Around 16% just love getting more into the sci-fi they love. Fist bumps, fanpeeps.

Alerts

Seems like half of you subscribe by RSS, 16% by Facebook and 16% by tweet. The RSS news came as lots of added answers, so is that choppy chunk on top.  One enterprising reader has set up an IFTTT alert. (Sweet.) The RSS news was an informative surprise. I presumed most folks were receiving alerts via Twitter and Facebook, and click through to the blog. I now should start thinking about the fact that many articles are read without the “chrome” of the blog ever been seen.

Sharing/social

I asked about sharing content as that’s how I have any hope of growing my audience. And for all the time this takes me and the other authors, I’d love to see the audience grow. But you’re only likely to share when the content is particularly awesome, in-depth, or about something that’s always bothered you.

Some folks said they didn’t know I did social media in relation to the site, and that makes sense knowing how many people subscribe by RSS. The social media links are visible on the website. They wouldn’t appear on emails. So, for you RSS readers…

• I tweet notifications of new content from @scifiinterfaces. I also post to this (linked) page on Facebook.
• Final reviews also get posted to reddit, so if you’re a redditor, there’s lots of related content on the FUI subreddit.
• Videos take a massive amount of work, but when I have them, I have a channel on Youtube.

There are also links to Make It So, to t-shirts, and errata from the book that you may have never seen. The tip button folks didn’t know about is at the top-right of every page on the site, but not in the RSS feed.

Some readers reported that they don’t know anyone else with their same interest in sci-fi interfaces, so let me take the chance to recommend the Facebook group and reddit as a place you can get to know other folks with these same interests. Some warning: Nearly all other sites with a similar focus tends to collect examples with very little analysis. But still.

Next up we’ll talk about the important thing, and that’s what you think of the content.

I only asked after time zone, rather than location, which in retrospect was not smart. I was trying to figure when the best time to post was, but now I realize that wasn’t the only use of such information. Too late now. Maybe next year.

Looks like you’re concentrated in the middle of the Americas, and Lisbon/UK time zones. But there’s also readers on the continental-American coasts, Alaska(!), Europe, Southeast Asia, and what I suspect is Melbourne/Sydney. Hey look a chart.

WordPress gives me stats about the readership, too, but only down to the country. It largely agrees with the poll results, but I see that Japan may be happy reading but not so happy responding to polls. (A poll which was, admittedly, written in English.) If I crudely overlay the WordPress map to this map, looks like my anchors are North America, UK & Europe, and Eastern Australia. No surprise. English speaking worlds. (Though, I miss you, Ireland, South Africa, and New Zealand.)

Your jobs

I’m impressed with the breadth of jobs in the poll. We’re a bunch of smarties and creative types.

• 7 UX
• 6 Software (not in a design capacity)
• 6 Visual design for software
• 3 I make sci-fi interfaces
• 3 Education

A handful of game designers/developers (and author…) I wish we all lived near each other. We could have a sci-fi game night at someone’s place.

• Tabletop Gamer
• Game development & Education
• Game designer, author, and publisher of Traveler5 materials
• Former game developer; working as freelance now

Then an interesting set of one-offs.

• Sci-fi writing & editing
• Writer
• AI programmer for games
• Smart spaces/interactive installations
• Visual effects (3D environments not sci-fi interfaces)
• Management
• Aerospace Engineering
• Big data
• Marketing, but I studied interface / interaction design
• Advertising
• Software development
• Multiple: web design in higher education, art, graphic design on the side
• Not related to science [sic]

Your social media

The poll showed a breakout that’s pretty similar to wider trends in the world, though Facebook is less popular than in the wider world and Twitter is more popular amongst you. Also there’s a stronger showing for Google Plus, and some fun one-offs, below.

• My dinosaur habits: RSS, blogs
• Citizens of the Imperium
• I tweet but not very often.
• Dreamwidth, mastodon

Hearing about scifiinterfaces

Seems like most folks heard about the site through an online article. (Was it a particular one? Comment? I owe someone some thanks.) Some of you just went out and found it and some saw a tweet about it. One actually transcribed the URL printed in the related book. Damn. Props.

So that’s who’s out there, roughly where you are, and what you do. Next up we’ll talk about how you use the site. 

Last summer, at the 5 year anniversary of the blog, I ran a readership poll. Thanks to everyone who took a few minutes back then to answer it (now closed). I know when I answer a poll I’m always curious about the results. So I presume you are, too. Here ya go.

Crap

First apologies on some aspects of the poll. I should have made some things multiple-choice, but by the time I caught it was too late. Shifting midway through the poll would mean I’d have to divide the results between radio-button and checkbox responses, and that would have been headachey. Next time, next time.

Overview

There were a total of 51 responses.

Overall, looks like me and the other authors are doing pretty good. 8 out of 10. Personally, I’ve always been a solid B+/A- student, so this plays out. 5 responders think the site is near god-like (that or they’re prone to hyperbole) and a couple of folks said we’re doing below average. Sorry, you two. Thanks for sticking with it.

The overview done, I thought my roundup and response to the poll was going to be a simple thing, but I was wrong. Between the aggregated data and the individual responses, it was too much for a single post. Also, I realized that some of my responses might raise some conversation from the group of us at large, which works much better if the post is limited to one concept so the comments don’t get muddled. So I’ll be breaking the results into three bigger posts.

1. The readership (you)
2. How the site is used
3. Your wishlist

Followed by a smattering of one-off comments-and-responses.

This also buys me some time while I’m preparing other material. But you’d guessed that.