I saw Wall-e last night and to say that I am completely hooked is an understatement. Long story short, it transcended my definition of movie and went straight to experience. I was completely and utterly absorbed.

Forward now to the applicability of what we do when we design interfaces. That sort of deeply-entrenched, loss-of-awareness of the outside world may be what we seek to accomplish when we design an interface. Caveat: in some instances e.g. vehicle display design, this is precisely opposite what we're trying to accomplish, but that is a different post.

I happened to stumble across an interview with Andrew Stanton, the film's creator and director, where he was discussing the design process from inception to completion. The parallels to what we do are immediate:

• storyboarding to explain the major staging and action of the characters
• layout, or determining what goes where
• effects - determining unique sequences that need to be individually designed
• animation: our equivalent of interaction design
• lighting, which Stanton describes as the point in time when you begin to see the film beginning to look as it will appear to the rest of the world. He further describes this as a "morale boost" to those involved with its creation.
• The schedule, which for one sequence/scene took a year from storyboarding to completion.

By breaking down these individual elements and assigning teams to address each item, Pixar has managed to create great movies that audiences love time and again. In the case of Wall-e, Stanton indicates that the sequence played in the interview was begun in the late summer of 2004.

I think that simultaneously paying attention to all of these elements in our own work results in an excellent experience for our customers as well. The other big takeaway of Stanton's interview for me was the fact that quality work takes time, and lots of it. I am certain that Pixar, as part of Disney, has their share of executives with sometimes unrealistic expectations regarding launch dates and level of effort required to accomplish a task, but somewhere along the way, someone has done a fine job of educatng them on what it takes to realy do the job well. We should strive to do the same.