4 ms·

When I think about creating lifelike responses, I tend to think of action potentials. Have a counter which tends to decay toward zero over time. When you attemp

When I think about creating lifelike responses, I tend to think of action potentials. Have a counter which tends to decay toward zero over time. When you attempt to do something, nudge the counter upwards. When the counter exceeds some threshold, do some behavior and the clear the counter. Note that this kind of mechanism is inherently stateful. That said, I think that incorporating randomness or hidden variables into a user interface is rather misguided. Making a system harder to reason about takes control away from the user- it's basically an even more severe version of the problems with "Do What I Mean" in general.

sudara 14y ago
"Lifelike responses" — nice. I like that "action potential" idea – I was trying to think of a good implementation for "do something twice a month per user" — decaying counter is a nice idea. I'm with you on willy nilly making parts of your UI random — my use case is for changing up the text in greetings, general play with copy, and once in a while showing something like a tip or a "welcome back" message. Basically, small touches that convey a small sense of variety (vs. RANDOMLY DONT SHOW THE NAV!)
- to3m 14y ago
  For printing varied text strings, what I've done is allow entries in the string table to have multiple text strings rather than just one. So if the code asks for the string GREETING, for example, rather than the string table code getting this one and only text for GREETING ("hello", say), it randomly picks one from the set (you might have "hello", "hi", "good day", perhaps). Then whoever looks after the wording can just add as many strings as they like, for any messages they think could do with some variety. No forward planning required, because the code to do this is centralized, so it works for any string.
- ZoFreX 14y ago
  The problem with using Random for displaying nice touches and reminder notices is that, well, it's random. It won't take very long for a user to get a rare and annoying "Have you thought about upgrading?" (or similar) message three times in a row, at which point they're likely to get annoyed.

sudara 14y ago

"Lifelike responses" — nice. I like that "action potential" idea – I was trying to think of a good implementation for "do something twice a month per user" — decaying counter is a nice idea. I'm with you on willy nilly making parts of your UI random — my use case is for changing up the text in greetings, general play with copy, and once in a while showing something like a tip or a "welcome back" message. Basically, small touches that convey a small sense of variety (vs. RANDOMLY DONT SHOW THE NAV!)

to3m 14y ago
For printing varied text strings, what I've done is allow entries in the string table to have multiple text strings rather than just one. So if the code asks for the string GREETING, for example, rather than the string table code getting this one and only text for GREETING ("hello", say), it randomly picks one from the set (you might have "hello", "hi", "good day", perhaps). Then whoever looks after the wording can just add as many strings as they like, for any messages they think could do with some variety. No forward planning required, because the code to do this is centralized, so it works for any string.
ZoFreX 14y ago
The problem with using Random for displaying nice touches and reminder notices is that, well, it's random. It won't take very long for a user to get a rare and annoying "Have you thought about upgrading?" (or similar) message three times in a row, at which point they're likely to get annoyed.