4 ms·

Instead of an "expert system" for posting guidelines, the UI can expose and explain functionality. Can't upvote or down vote a story? white-out the arrows and

by mahmud 17y ago

Instead of an "expert system" for posting guidelines, the UI can expose and explain functionality. Can't upvote or down vote a story? white-out the arrows and put an alt="can't (up|down)vote story, you don't have enough foo". Can't reply to a post? remove the link but leave a white "reply" text in a box with gray sunken borders. Hovering over it should show the reason why. Each deactivated post can also log its status and reason for disabling right in the title, or somewhere in the header area; maybe the top-color can change? People shouldn't be sent to an Information Desk; instead, the system should be self-documenting, if not self-evident.

asciilifeform 17y ago
Thank you. This is what I would have said, had I been thinking straight.
RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
I agree with most of what you say, and I certainly agree that most interfaces - this one included - can and should be more transparent than they are. It's a good objective for which we must strive. Expose reasons where they exist, give explanations as a part of the UI, this is all good. However, and this is where I wish I were more eloquent, and more of a writer than doer, because I'm sure I'm not going to say this as well as I want ... I can't help but feel that there are cases where the ideals of instant obviousness and total transparency actively prevent the potential for power use. Insisting that everything is self-documenting is, I feel, inherently self-limiting. I feel sure that in some cases it's right to have a learning curve, and some effort required to be expended. Insisting that everything be instantly obvious to everyone who stumbles across it is, I think, creating the expectation that everything should be like that. It's a gut reaction. To paraphrase an old, hackneyed and much criticised observation: Everything should be as obvious as possible, but no more. Perhaps there's a place for the unobvious.
- mahmud 17y ago
  FWIW, I too gave this a little more thought, and from an engineering prespective, found that my proposed solution would tightly couple UI with business logic if greater care isn't taken. I am sure it isn't much overhead in simple news.arc to selectively render UI elements based on the status of a post, for example, but in larger applications, feature-requests could lead to a lot of conditionals creeping into display rendering. What we need is to study and consolidate "Adaptive User-Interfaces" (a well stablished field of study, btw) with software engineering, and specially the web (and even more specially, with respect to dynamic programming languages and in my case Lisp and CLOS.) Something I have been doing lately was reverse-engineering a few google apps from their rendered HTML and minified JS. I don't wanna throw speculations around, but I think Google has some sort of a "learning" engine which adjusts the shown content to the estimated level of user expertise. They do this with a "newbie cookie". See the sources for any google apps help pages, for example, and you will see this: var global_newbie_cookie = "newbie_11"; Here is one: http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?answer=77003 http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?answer=77003 Your global newbie cookie should be different than mine. Regards.
  - ErrantX 17y ago
    mine is newbie_11 too - on all the computers I tried in the office.
    - mahmud 17y ago
      I would kill to know what that variable does. Maybe they're ranking the technical expertise of the user based on what section of the help pages he is? Say, asking for help on gmail SMTP relaying is different that asking for help on how to use the calendar.

by mahmud 17y ago

asciilifeform 17y ago

Thank you. This is what I would have said, had I been thinking straight.

RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago

I agree with most of what you say, and I certainly agree that most interfaces - this one included - can and should be more transparent than they are. It's a good objective for which we must strive. Expose reasons where they exist, give explanations as a part of the UI, this is all good. However, and this is where I wish I were more eloquent, and more of a writer than doer, because I'm sure I'm not going to say this as well as I want ... I can't help but feel that there are cases where the ideals of instant obviousness and total transparency actively prevent the potential for power use. Insisting that everything is self-documenting is, I feel, inherently self-limiting. I feel sure that in some cases it's right to have a learning curve, and some effort required to be expended. Insisting that everything be instantly obvious to everyone who stumbles across it is, I think, creating the expectation that everything should be like that. It's a gut reaction. To paraphrase an old, hackneyed and much criticised observation: Everything should be as obvious as possible, but no more. Perhaps there's a place for the unobvious.

mahmud 17y ago
FWIW, I too gave this a little more thought, and from an engineering prespective, found that my proposed solution would tightly couple UI with business logic if greater care isn't taken. I am sure it isn't much overhead in simple news.arc to selectively render UI elements based on the status of a post, for example, but in larger applications, feature-requests could lead to a lot of conditionals creeping into display rendering. What we need is to study and consolidate "Adaptive User-Interfaces" (a well stablished field of study, btw) with software engineering, and specially the web (and even more specially, with respect to dynamic programming languages and in my case Lisp and CLOS.) Something I have been doing lately was reverse-engineering a few google apps from their rendered HTML and minified JS. I don't wanna throw speculations around, but I think Google has some sort of a "learning" engine which adjusts the shown content to the estimated level of user expertise. They do this with a "newbie cookie". See the sources for any google apps help pages, for example, and you will see this: var global_newbie_cookie = "newbie_11"; Here is one: http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?answer=77003 http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?answer=77003 Your global newbie cookie should be different than mine. Regards.
- ErrantX 17y ago
  mine is newbie_11 too - on all the computers I tried in the office.
  - mahmud 17y ago
    I would kill to know what that variable does. Maybe they're ranking the technical expertise of the user based on what section of the help pages he is? Say, asking for help on gmail SMTP relaying is different that asking for help on how to use the calendar.