preserving the knowledge

Human beings have always sought to make sense of their environment by labelling things (even if it was just different shades of “ugg” for a while). The modern (don’t make me say Web 2.0) web projects are popular, mainly because they give us a chance to label things for ourselves. Everyone’s understanding is different, and the same symbol will usually conjure up a whole range of labels, depending on the observer’s own experience of that symbol. With this is mind, it is necessary to agree some common ground, and a dictionary of agreed associations and meaning for a particular symbol.

I look after a quirkily-written application at work, where the symbol for ‘click here to go into the details page from the summary page’ is a dustbin. Yes, a dustbin. The (clearly only *almost*) obvious symbol for deletion/discarding/removal is actually the button you need to click to go into the screen to deal with the item on the list. This actually causes me pain when I click on it, as my brain is screaming no from the symbol-recognition point of view, while also telling me that I know how the button works and it’s safe to click on it. This kind of conflict makes it very difficult for users to use the application, as the brain ‘forgets’ the real use of the button and sees only the symbol.

Choosing appropriate representations of a particular concept or action is an often-underestimated skill: it requires the empathy to put yourself in the position of your user and what they might have been exposed to and how they might classify the action they need to take. It’s all very well that we have absorbed certain standard symbols for certain concepts and actions, but what if the user has not been exposed to these symbols? I found myself trying to explain how to save a file in Word, to someone whose computer didn’t have a floppy drive. Why is the ‘save’ icon a disk? Why would she associate saving files, with a floppy disk? What’s a floppy disk? This is an example of a symbol that made sense at the time, and users have become accustomed to seeing it, so it still makes sense as it is familiar. But to a user who does not understand the symbol, it is no longer possible to grasp it even in a physical metaphor sense, as the physical method has changed. Saving files no longer ‘looks like’ floppy disks.

Like it or not, Microsoft have had a considerable influence upon the way we develop software interfaces. Through their sheer dominance, they have exposed most computer users to their way of doing things, so that any other way seems ‘wrong’ and ‘difficult’ for a user to grasp. If you want to write an interface to a word processing package, you had better make sure that it functions as the user expects it to i.e. like Word, or it will have to be *really* spectacular to compete. I wouldn’t say that this is necessarily a bad thing for those of us who have to support and train users!

But having a single driver of human interfaces with computers is probably not healthy. Having a single commercial company in charge of human-computer metaphors ties in the majority of users to doing things the Microsoft way, as anything else doesn’t fit their trained knowledge of symbols.

Part of the problem is superstition: the symbol *becomes* the thing, rather than a representation of the thing. In my experience, the user doesn’t think about how and why they are performing an action, and what the mechanisms are. The number of times I’ve been told ‘I just click on this button when I’m done’. When questioned as to what the button is supposed to achieve, they don’t know. Such brittle understanding isn’t solely confined to computer use, I know, but it is one of the things that makes innovation in interface design so daunting a task. Yes, you can come up with fantastic and nifty ways of representing what the user should be doing, but unless it translates on some level to something they are familiar with, you will have an uphill struggle.

Most of the problems I get with the Quirky Application are through misunderstanding of the interface – symbols are misused, buttons are in odd places and perform strange functions. I don’t blame the users (even when laboriously cleaning up the sorry state of their data), I don’t really blame the developers (although it might not sound like it sometimes, when I find some of the more interesting features)- user interface design is a tricky skill to master, especially when you don’t have the R&D resource of a software monolith.

Where the whole social web software concept is helping, is that it is training users to think about what something represents and how to summarise it. Think about tagging: what you are essentially doing (if you are a responsible tagger, that is) is boiling down an entire page/site into just a few words that will represent that article/site. You have to pick words that other people will think of and might be searching for, and you have to think of as many possible alternatives that describe the same thing. As an English teacher I would be jumping for joy about this concept: a chance to demonstrate that a good grasp on language and synonyms is useful for *trendy* things! It is finally cool to flex your vocabulary.

What I like most about the phenomenon of tagging and collaborative works is the idea that it gives everyone a little more insight into how other people might be thinking. I’d be really interested to put up a site full of common and proposed user-interface symbols and see what they get tagged with. Maybe we can collaboratively brainstorm our way into a new era of symbols.. I’ll get right on that.