Let’s talk about The Curious Case of the Pygmy Nuthatch. It’s a wild ride so you might want to go read it before continuing because spoilers.
You see, there’s a scene in that movie that tormented me, that kept me up at night, and that lately has had me interrogating a wide variety of seemingly devoted, and certainly well-compensated, filmmaking professionals. That’s because the bird in Charlie’s Angels is, I believe, the wrongest bird in the history of cinema—and one of the weirdest and most inexplicable flubs in any movie I can remember. It is elaborately, even ornately wrong. It has haunted not just me but, as I’d later learn, the birding community at large for almost a quarter of a century.
[….]
“It’s a Sitta pygmaea!” observes Cameron Diaz’s Natalie, who is allegedly a bird expert. “A pygmy nuthatch! They only live in one place: Carmel!”
The problems with the scene are as follows:
First, the pygmy nuthatch does not “only live in one place.” I’ve personally seen pygmy nuthatches in at least three states, and they can be found in at least three countries.
Second, the bird shown on-screen is not a pygmy nuthatch. The pygmy nuthatch is a tiny, drab, almost gray-scale bird, so small it can fit inside a roll of toilet paper. Instead, what’s on-screen is a Venezuelan troupial, which is black and neon orange, almost six times the size of a pygmy nuthatch, and also—as the name suggests—not found in Carmel.
Finally, and this might be the most baffling thing, the bird heard on the soundtrack is neither a pygmy nuthatch nor a Venezuelan troupial. It’s an unknown third bird whose identity has, until now, befuddled birders for years.
As Forrest Wickman points out in the beginning of the article, movies get bird songs wrong all the time. Sometimes that’s done for good movie reasons (bald eagles don’t sound nearly as dramatic as hawks for example) and sometimes it’s an honest mistake.
But as we read through this odd adventure (really, you should read it for yourself first) we find that the reason there are three different birds involved in this one pivotal scene of the movie is because three different groups are solving for three different problems.
1. The original writer was trying to make sure that the bird was interesting sounding, and if possible also accurate to science. When he left the movie, the other sixteen writers were aiming to solve one problem: what bird name sounds funniest? The pygmy nuthatch.
2. The animal casting director decided the bird needed to be visually interesting and the pygmy nuthatch is definitely not that. But also, it’s not legal in the US to use a pygmy nuthatch in a movie. So the animal handlers chose the Venezuelan troupial, a brightly colored tropical bird that is very photogenic.
3. The sound director decided the bird needed to be audibly interesting and neither the pygmy nuthatch nor the Venezuelan troupial were going to fit the bill. So they chose a different bird call, which I won’t ruin for you because you should have something to look forward to in the story.
If presenting a fantastic narrative is the project goal, then each of the choices that were made were correct — a funny sounding bird name, a photogenic bird, and a fantastic-sounding bird call add up together to a better show for the average movie watcher. As with all fiction, there’s a certain level of suspension of disbelief required for a person to enjoy a story — and that’s easier to do in Charlie’s Angels if the movie watcher doesn’t know anything about birds in the first place.
But if your movie watchers include bird watchers and other people who know how birds work, this kind of problem solving can absolutely throw the movie watcher out of the movie. The more of a complete mental model of birds the audience member has, the harder it is to suspend their disbelief.
As a web designer in an enterprise company, if I was tasked with the goal of presenting a bird to the user, it would most likely be my responsibility to try to present a cohesive bird to the user. We don’t know how many users would hit a cognitive wall because they’re actually birders and while the number could be low (in which case any bird would do) they could also be high (in which case the bird will cause the user to be unable to complete their task, at least temporarily, possibly altogether.)
With requirements like the ones the movie designers were facing — looks good, sounds good, name sounds humorous — it would be the kind of challenge where I’d likely be choosing a range of birds and then negotiating with the Art Director and the Product Manager to pick a bird. These choices are analogous to the kinds of decisions we make on any web project.
- How long do you want me to work on this challenge?
- Can I get metrics around how many of the users are birders or at least can tell a nuthatch from a tropical bird?
- Do we have existing research on how much cognitive dissonance we can cause in a birder before they can no longer suspend their disbelief?
- If we don’t have research, are we willing (as an organization) to fund it for this project?
- Do I have a budget specifically for this kind of work, and if so, how much?
- Are you willing to be flexible on the requirement that the bird hit all three goals, or is there one goal that is more important to hit than the others, giving me some wiggle room?
- What other resources does the organization have to help me make this decision?
And then, of course, there’s the question that the designers in the weeds hate the most: how important is it to get this right really?
I hate it, anyway.
As a designer, I want my designs to make sense. I want them to keep the user flowing from beginning to end. I may also want whimsey, and maybe even delight, but those are secondary to whatever their goal is. It’s their goal I really want to complete.
But when we’re tasked with a list of goals that is incompatible with the actual data on the table — make the pygmy nuthatch funny-sounding to say and visually and audibly striking — we’re forced to present our own leadership with options that we know are going to cause someone cognitive dissonance, even if it’s only ourselves.
We also have to ask ourselves what we’re sacrificing when we build something inauthentic. Are we sacrificing the user’s trust in our quality, or our data? Their ability to concentrate? Their understanding of the site? What are the costs of a design with such fractious requirements?
Each project and each organization is going to have different answers. And honestly, most of the time in enterprise product design, we don’t even have time to truly answer them. But they’re worth answering, even if it’s so that decades later, when someone has questions about the pygmy nuthatch, we can give them honest answers.
