At the Movies

My husband and I just saw “Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince” at a discount matinee and nearly empty theater. Many things have changed about our family’s experience of the HP events. (And events, they were!)

Our 3 children are roughly the same ages as the Hogwarts bunch and have grown up together. Marjorie, our middle child, is THE American Hermione. Looks, brains, personality, hair–the Marjorie/Hermione similarities are remarkable. Marjorie’s passion for HP has infected us. As a family, we’ve fought for first reading rights, listened to all the recorded editions on road trips (Jim Dale is THE BEST), and have gone to the films together–near opening day.

No more.

17-yr-olds do not go to the movies with their parents. Two months after release.

Ahhh…they grow up so fast!

Anyway, the reason I share this nostalgia is that I noticed how the in-theater and at-home movie experiences have flip-flopped:

Want a quiet viewing with few people/interruptions in “intimate” setting where you can hear the dialog? Go to the matinee after the movie’s been moved out of the “big screen” theater.

Want the buzz of crowds, smell of popcorn, and people bumping into you to get to their seat? Watch a video at home on a Friday night as waves of teens come and go through your kitchen/family room.

Flip-flopped. Totally!

Self-Scan

As we left the theater, we received duplicate text messages from our eldest: please pick up cream! Our son has recently ‘discovered’ cappuccino. So off to the nearest grocery.

Now, both of us are pretty savvy, technologically speaking. I design & code websites. My husband is an IT guy. But, funny thing, we were a bit s.l.o.w. at the self-check. Took the two of us to figure out how to purchase one quart of half-and-half. (Oh, the irony!)

My excuse is I never use ‘em. I feed teens! The odds of me EVER going through the 15-items-or-less lane are slim. And self-check? HA! $200 of groceries? I think not.

Jim’s excuse? Ummm…he’s blind in one eye. Or, perhaps…

We had UN-LEARNED a Behavior

Yup. How else to explain the two of us staring at the check-out screen trying to figure how to finish the transaction? Scanned the cream, put it in the bag, fed the bill (yeah, cash!) into machine, and just wanted to be done.

Finished? End? OK? Enter? Give me my change and let me out of here so I stop holding up the line and looking stupid???? Where’s the #$%#$^& button?????

It was there. Smack dab in the middle of the screen. Damn near as BIG as a business card.

But we didn’t immediately see it. Why?

Because it was blinking.

Blinking=advertising. Blinking=annoying. Blinking=visual cacophony. Blinking=all those busy bleeping header/sidebar/inserted ads populating websites that we’ve LEARNED to ignore to read the REAL content.

LOOK at the flashy thing. It’s important! The learned behavior that was expected has been un-learned. These days, the learned behavior is avoid the flashy thing because it is a distraction to my mission. Now I’ve got to go and UN-Learn what I learned.

Which is kind of confusing, don’t you think?

User Behavior Update

Seems my husband and I were behaving normally after all! See Usability Resources.