Back To The Future screen interface to travel in time
After the Back to the future day, I started thinking of how that screen interface would have been designed if the movie were made nowadays. I applied the Jakob Nielsen's design heuristics that I’ve been learning to improve the experience and I changed the aesthetics to make it more recognizable and look like a design circa. 2015. The design is made in English using the Gregorian Calendar.
The first thing that I noticed is the original screen is full of information that is not relevant. The main purpose of a possible time traveler is going sometime so I focused on the info about “when” I would like to go. The info about when we are right at the moment is useful, but you cannot change it so it doesn’t make sense displaying it in the same way as information that we can change (when are we going to go). Following the minimalist design heuristic, I decided to keep that but less relevant than what the user really needs to set up to achieve his/her purpose. And I included an “time-based” icon a familiar metaphor to tell the user that’s your time at the moment.
Then we continue with the set up. If we have learnt something from time travelling movies is it could be dangerous so we don’t want to have any errors while setting up the time. That’s why I decided not to use text boxes where you can write all the fields by yourself, but arrows where you select the month, day, year and time among the options that the system has only. We don’t want to create any paradoxes if someone types “February 31st″
The main problem with this option was “what if someone wants to travel to the year 1? It would take him/her ages to scroll back 2014 years!” The solution that I came up with, as you can see already, was splitting the years into two fields. The first one lets you select the century and the second one the exact year when you want to go. And I added a feature that I always missed in the movie: you’ll have the option to go back to Before Christ times! Yeah, I know, you cannot travel to the Prehistory era with this UI. That feature is available with the premium traveling time option only.
After setting up all the fields, hit the “start travelling” button and enjoy your trip.