Discover the best of the web!
Learn more about Digg by taking the tour.
Magic Ink: Information Software and the Graphical Interface
worrydream.com — "The ubiquity of frustrating, unhelpful software interfaces has motivated decades of research into “Human-Computer Interaction.” In this paper, I suggest that the long-standing focus on “interaction” may be misguided. For a majority subset of software, called “information software,..."
kevinrose- 460 diggs
- digg it
- bjohns, on 10/12/2007, -0/+14I'll be honest, I didn't read all of that.
- hiPpymIck, on 10/12/2007, -5/+3nor did i
- resplence, on 10/12/2007, -2/+12But let's digg it anyway just because of the submitter.
- garreh, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I just looked at the pictures. To be honest, I was bewildered and overwhelmed by some of the recommended redesigns, however some of them were good (the book one).
- iFrikkenR, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1TL;DR
- hdar3415, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7That's a lot of information on one web page.
- xtis, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Looks very interesting, but I don't think I could read it online either.
A hardcopy would be nice, but I can't even print it the way it is - sidenotes and images are overlapping the text. Needs a better print media stylesheet. - Djurkinthebox, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Just like my books, I only read web pages with pictures...
- lostnthemix, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1There are a lot of images, just way down the page.
- crazybrit, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Quick, someone summarize it with Safari!
- punterfpc, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Ok, here you go...
# Although this paper presents a number of concrete design and engineering ideas, the larger intent is to introduce a “unified theory” of information software design, and provide inspiration and direction for progressive designers who suspect that the world of software isn’t as flat as they’ve been told.
...This is a broad field, because people have such a variety of messages to convey—identity, social status, emotion, persuasion, and so on. Most relevant to software is a branch that Edward Tufte calls information design—the use of pictures to express knowledge of interest to the reader.** Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (2001).... A good graphic designer understands how to arrange information on the page so the reader can ask and answer questions, make comparisons, and draw conclusions.
# When the software designer defines the visual representation of her program, when she describes the pictures that the user will interpret, she is doing graphic design, whether she realizes this or not.
...# When the software designer defines the interactive aspects of her program, when she places these pseudo-mechanical affordances and describes their behavior, she is doing a virtual form of industrial design.
...Thus, this paper will simply treat communication software as manipulation software and information software glued together, and mention it no further.** This dismissal is rather disingenuous—communication software is fundamentally unlike the other two because its user is a group, and a group as a whole can have different goals than any of its constituents individually.
...# Furthermore, the industrial and graphic designs in manipulation software must be in intimate synergy, since it is the graphic design which describes how the object can be manipulated—the mechanical affordances are graphical constructs. Even more graphically challenging is manipulation of abstract objects, such as music or financial data, where the graphical representation must show not only what can be done with it, but what it is in the first place.** As opposed to painting software, for instance, where the graphical representation can be the artifact itself.
...# In the spring and summer of 1957… I tried to keep track of what one moderately technical person [myself] actually did during the hours he regarded as devoted to work… About 85 per cent of my “thinking” time was spent getting into a position to think, to make a decision, to learn something I needed to know.... When the graphs were finished, the relations were obvious at once, but the plotting had to be done in order to make them so… Throughout the period I examined, in short, my “thinking” time was devoted mainly to activities that were essentially clerical or mechanical: searching, calculating, plotting, transforming, determining the logical or dynamic consequences of a set of assumptions or hypotheses, preparing the way for a decision or an insight.** J.C.R.
...# Most of the time, a person sits down at her personal computer not to create, but to read, observe, study, explore, make cognitive connections, and ultimately come to an understanding.
...# There are a number of graphic design criticisms one could make—the uniform text size and weight results in a solid, oppressive mass; the abundance of saturated primary colors gives a distracting, carnival-like appearance; the text is spread all over the page, giving the eye no well-defined path to follow.
...That is, she must navigate by hand instead of by eye, and must use her memory to compare information across time instead of space.
...To find all movie showings around a particular time, the viewer simply scans her eye vertically down the page.
...# For example, a rider consulting a bus schedule must comb through a matrix of times and stations to find the single relevant data point—the time of the next bus.** And then, she must consult her watch and do some arithmetic to calculate the information she actually cares about—how long she will be waiting.
...Context allows software to winnow its data space to the subset of information that the user cares about, and present the data in such a way that the user’s current questions can best be answered.
...This is reasonable in many situations where the user’s context is fairly static, changing slowly over the short term. For example, if yesterday, the user looked for one-bedroom apartments in North Berkeley, she is is probably still interested in one-bedroom apartments in North Berkeley today.
...This allows them to winnow an enormous dataset (their catalog of movies) down to a dozen data points (movies the user hasn’t seen, which were enjoyed by people with similar taste), which can be presented in a single, navigation-free graphic.... TiVo similarly uses a collaborative predictor to infer which television programs the user would be interested in. These are presented on a “suggestions” page, and recorded automatically when possible.** For technical details, see Ali and van Stam’s paper TiVo: Making Show Recommendations Using a Distributed Collaborative Filtering Architecture (2004).
...For a yellow pages directory, the data space contains all business listings; for a movie guide, all showtimes and movie information; for a flight planner, trips to and from all airports.
...The tool can present the designer with a data set that would disambiguate an unclear relation, and the designer would then draw a snapshot for that particular data set. We might imagine the design process becoming inverted, driven by the tool—the designer would create a few representative examples, and then let the tool explicitly ask for all of the examples necessary to fill out the model.** There are a number of Programming By Demonstration research systems that take a similar interactive approach to disambiguation.
- punterfpc, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Ok, here you go...
- fuckingusername, on 10/12/2007, -7/+1no pictures and just text = no digg
- resplence, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Wow, I just watched Idiocracy and pretty much all of the above comments are scary. The article presents very interesting insights to anyone who is a usability and ux freak like me. A very good read and well worthy of your time.
- ferggo, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Holy crap.
This is pretty much the best software design paper ever.
Definitely going to read that more thoroughly when I get a little spare time.
Superb find, Kevin. Get this guy on the Digg team, stat! :) - polarengineer, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0PETERMAN: Ah, yes. Well this certainly looks like a lot of words. In record time. I'm very impressed.
- drgordonfreeman, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Welcome to 1996. See also: the entire research fields of ubiquitous computing, calm technologies, and ambient information displays.
- Shutter, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Dugg, but not because of the submitter... it's good content.
- polarengineer, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0PETERMAN: Unfortunately, I am also disgusted. This is incoherent drivel! This is a total redo. And I'm assuming I need it right away.
- robohoe, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Stop with the Peterman jokes.
- polarengineer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0JERRY: Hey, have you heard the one about the guy in hell with the coffee and the doughtnuts and--
- sonofagunn, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I don't necessarily agree with all of the article, but dugg anyway b/c we need more articles like this. Great content and great ideas which should help a lot of people design better web sites.
- SenatorPenguin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Ironic that a document promoting usability and accessibility is so amazingly hard to read in its entirety.
Granted, what I read was very interesting, and this is not meant for consumers and users, but developer/designers.
This will be saved along with the countless other things I need to read. - nickgarvey, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2If I hold the PG DOWN button, and it takes more than 5 seconds to get to the bottom, it is WAY too long.
- yahoofrom, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1This article is even longer than the loooooooong cat.
- sarahmaddelson, on 10/11/2007, -0/+0Really good. Rubbish. I'd better go and drink some vodka...=(
- ponosocheg, on 10/11/2007, -0/+0Doubtful info... sweet!
- mvannatter, on 10/11/2007, -0/+0Unbelievable! magic inc technology was introduced ten yrs ago!!!!
- kraigdaemon, on 10/11/2007, -0/+0Amazing. I'm not impressed. Butt dugg it for some reason.
- gesturemaker, on 10/11/2007, -0/+0Dugg that. I'm not impressed. Butt dugg it for some reason.
- mhmdkhamis, on 10/13/2007, -0/+0http://www.paramegsoft.com/el3b/
http://name.paramegsoft.com/ - mhmdkhamis, on 10/23/2007, -0/+0http://www.paramegsoft.com/forum/
http://game.paramegsoft.com/
© Digg Inc. 2008 —
Content posted by