3 ms·
Make Data Not Look Like Data
- jordyhoyt 18y agoShort, and very very good. Those diagrams will definitely stick with me.
- sh1mmer 18y agoThis is why it's important to have good UED (user experience design) people. It can be very frustrating for a programmers to work with them because they just don't seem to care how hard it is to create some design they've come up with. They keep warbling on about some people called "users", who are the most important apparently... funny that.
- Herring 18y agoBad screenshot. It blends into the article so I thought it was about him & ignored it. It took a while to find wtf he was talking about in the dzone article.
- extension 18y agoThis is the opposite of the problem. For any non-trivial application, the user needs to understand the data model they are working with. They don't need to know the gritty details of how things are encoded and enumerated, but they do need to be aware of the entities and their relationships. This is true for any kind of user, savvy or not. Deep usability problems happen when the application omits, hides or distorts aspects of the model that the user is manipulating. For example: - inline formatting codes in word processors - fake folders in filesystems e.g. My Documents - "apply" button in dialogs - wizards Design should start with the user model, then create the user interface to manipulate it. The internal model can be different from the user model but they should have a one-to-one mapping.
- eru 18y agoPerhaps they should have a well-defined mapping. Why should one-to-one be helpful?