Blog of Much Holding

THIS is fantastic, and completely accurate. Celebrate Oscar weekend by watching this:

Warning: This post contains extreme geekery and wish-fulfillment and should not be considered as anything more than my blue-sky fantasy on my part. I think it is a good idea, and hope that someone somewhere with the ability to “make it so” is reading…

One of the many things that Star Trek doesn’t have that its rival space epic Star Wars has is a tourist attraction. Star Trek used to have the great Star Trek Experience attraction in Las Vegas, but that has been gone for over 18 months now. Star Wars has the long running (and soon to be revamped) Star Tours ride at Disneyland and Disney World, and Disney also offers the Star Wars weekends special events every year in Orlando.

Yes, Star Trek has a traveling exhibition, which is cool, but it’s not like the Experience was – a must-see destination for Trekkers like me. They are still trying to get the Experience revived but the economy – especially in the troubled Las Vegas region – is not helping matters. So, I thought to myself as I was daydreaming the other day, how do you do a permanent Star Trek destination on the cheap?

The answer came in a flash. Retheming.

Retheming is the term used when a theme park attraction is, in affect, “re-skinned”; When a new tie-in or story is applied to an old attraction, to leverage the legacy hardware and building. And no one does it better than Disney.

Disney has rethemed buildings at their parks numerous times, a fairly recent example being when they changed a mostly-empty stage building to the American Idol Experience at Disney’s Hollywood Studios. It’s cheap (compared to building a new attraction), it’s relatively quick to implement, and can draw people in who would not have gone to the “old” attraction before.

I have three retheming ideas Disney can use if they cut a deal to license Star Trek (which would not be unprecedented – Universal licenses Star Trek form Paramount for an attraction in the 1980s).

Option 1: Stitch’s Great Escape. Instead of having Stitch in the center of the auditorium, have a Borg be the specimen that has been captured. Enhance the ride with two or three cast members in Borg outfits browsing through the audience.. and give the audience Phasers attached to their seats that can let them defend themselves. Leave in the dark, scary moments and re-theme the entryway and signage to be Starfleet. It’s already been rethemed once before, why not again?

Option 2: Innoventions. Add Star Trek theming to Innoventions, and surround the new inventions to a Star Trek scenario. Have the cast members don the red, blue and gold tunics and divide the areas into science, engineering and command. Sell Star Trek merchandise in the carts in front of both entrances.

Option 3: Mission Space. This is one of my favorite rides at Epcot, and features a great spaceflight simulator that (unfortunately) not a lot of people ride nowadays. The thing is, the ride uses a fictional space agency and a futuristic space ship you pilot…. So how hard would it be to replace the agency with Star Trek and the space ship with a long-range shuttle in the ride film? Not very, I think. Rebrand the whole thing “Starfleet Academy”, put the cast members in Trek uniforms, and then rebrand the Advanced Training Lab play area and gift shop. Heck, you can even add on to the building and create a quick-service area/bar like Quarks (from the Star Trek Experience) or you can use the nearby (and mostly abandoned) Odyssey Center for the new Quarks Bar and Restaurant… Or a Star Trek museum.

It’s this last option – rebranding Mission Space – is the most ambitious and the one that I think would resonate with the most folks (it would also take away from the stigma the ride had after two people died on it the past few years). Of course, all this would cost money, and Disney is already tying up a lot of cash with a refresh of Fantasyland…

But I can’t help that it would work. As we saw with last year’s Star Trek reboot, a lot of people still love the property and a lot of new fans were created from the film. It would be expensive but not THAT expensive. And it could live up to the promise of Epcot, the city of the future. What’s more futuristic than Star Trek?

Anyway, it’ll probably never happen. But a man can dream…

While I try and maintain and update josephdickerson.com I have been posting more and more of my thoughts onto Twitter, and that “microblog” is updated a lot more than this one. I post links that I am interested in, retweet cool comments on user experience topics, witty bon mots, and random gibberish. If that’s the thing you’re into (and who isn’t?) then please follow me @josephdickerson.

There, that wasn’t too hard, was it?

This is funny stuff…

Let’s go back in time a bit – back in time to those carefree days of yore, when companies like Microsoft or Adobe piled new feature after new feature into each consecutive release of their flagship products… When each new release promoted a new shopping list of goodies to entice eager buyers to upgrade.

Remember all that? Because those days are long gone. Dead, and buried. The new rules of engagement? Not more features, but better features. Improvements, enhancements, and usability. The design of the software is now the selling point.

And I couldn’t be happier. Why is obvious, but I’ll state it directly anyway: Now the programs are designed for users, and not by engineers or project managers trying to one-up the competition. Now, the software is appropriate, appealing and most importantly USEFUL.

Two examples, both from the Big 800-lb Gorilla of software, Microsoft. Recently, Microsoft released the beta of their Microsoft Office 2010 suite, and the design enhancements are plentiful and incredible. They have designed a new File “menu” that groups like functions in a way that brings a gasp to users who are accustomed to the old awkward UI that was presented when they tried to print or export documents – it even provides context-driven options that are based on the specific Office program you are using, integrated and consistent across programs.

The second example? Microsoft’s recently announce Windows Mobile 7 operating system (renamed “Windows Phone 7”). The new UI is a dramatic departure from the standard phone interface, in that the UI is driven by data and not applications – contextual options display about your calendar mail and contacts, instead of having applications be the center of the interaction model. it’s unique, it’s user-centered and, frankly… it’s bold. It’s the type of innovative design work one would expect from a company like Apple – not Microsoft. It’s impressive.

So, when even the king of “featuritis” Microsoft starts to focus on experience design… well, the tide has turned.

It’s a great time to be a software designer, and an even better time to be a user experience designer – because, finally, the companies who make software “get it” – it’s about the how, not just about the what. It’s about making engaging appealing experiences for user – not just shipping lots of bullet-point functionality.

Is this an ongoing trend? Absolutely. I see more and more companies embracing a user-centered design model, especially in those areas where software is becoming a “commodity play” – which is, well, almost everywhere. I see good times – and great human-computer interactions – ahead.

THIS vid has me excited:

A gray Dalek, straight from the 70s! Some weird flipping-head dude! The statue from Blink! And a Silurian! Can. Not. Wait.