Presentation notes for "Language and the design of user interfaces"
In March 2007 I had a chance to give a presentation in Long Beach at the
annual WritersUA conference (
Geoffrey Pullum and
Jared Spool were also there). It was an hour and a half presentation, so these notes are pretty long, too. These references appear in the order they came in the presentation.
Part one: intro, design, intuitions
You can find a full list of SimCity's loading messages
here. They've got some pretty good ones.
“Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.”
Simon, H. (1981) The Science of Design, Chapter 5 in The Sciences of the Artificial, MIT Press, pp. 129-159. (This quote is on page 129 and is a pretty standard definition. A lot of people take Simon to task for thinking that people plan their interactions.)
The world is “already crammed with people, artifacts, and practices, each with their own histories, identities, goals, and plans…design [is] an hermeneutic process of interpretation and creation of meaning, where designers iteratively interpret the effects of their designs on the situation at hand.”
Fallman, D. (2003). “The Design-oriented attitude from In Romance with the Materials of Mobile Interaction: A Phenomenological Approach to the Design of Mobile Information Technology.” Doctoral Thesis, Umea University, Sweden. (This quote is from page 83. This dissertation has a lot of really good stuff in it for people interested in design thinking.)
“The guiding question is not, ‘How do you account for all human behavior?’ but ‘How do you design to augment people’s capacity to act?”
Winograd, T. (1994) "Categories, Disciplines, and Social Coordination," Journal of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, 2, 1994: 191-197. (This quote is on page 192; Winograd is writing a reply to Lucy Suchman's critique of "The Coordinator", a communication management tool Winograd and Flores proposed in their book, Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design (1986). All of this is worth reading, though you can probably skip some of the middle chapters in the 1986 book.)
“Our principal theoretical claim is that human beings are fundamentally linguistic beings: action happens in language, in a world constituted through language.”
Flores, F., M. Graves, B. Hartfield, and T. Winograd (1988). “Computer Systems and the Design of Organizational Interaction,” ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems 6:2. Pp. 153-72. (This quote appears on page 156; you can find similar arguments in Winograd and Flores's 1986 book, Understanding Computers and Cognition.)
Part two: words
To make sure you aren't just using jargon, download
BullFighter (originally created by Deloitte & Touche, but since spun off--still free, though). This Word plug-in will help disabuse you of "leverage" and "synergy".
Live a/b testing helps you know whether a difference in language or design really makes a difference in user behavior. Let's say you have a pretty boring (but clear) bit of language on a page but want to see what happens if you spice it up. You might keep most people seeing the original text, but put other people on a "b" version with the sexed up text. If these "b" people were randomly chosen but behave differently than the "a" population, then there's a good chance it's because of the change (you have to keep everything else the same or deal with REALLY complicated statistics). Here's a very brief
description from Wikipedia.
Priming seems to work both in word associations as well as syntactically, “in which subjects respond to a word more quickly when it occurs after another word that provides a syntactically well-informed context than after a syntactically unrelated word”.
See Goodman, G. O., McClelland, J. L., & Gibbs, R.W. 1981. “The role of syntactic context in word recognition.” Memory and Cognition, 9, 580–586. See also Pinker's The Language Instinct, pg 216: “Words can also help by suggesting to the parser exactly which other words they tend to appear with inside a given kind of phrase.”
People start retrieving information before they’re done hearing or reading a word.
Tanenhaus, M., M. Spivey-Knowlton, K. Eberhard, & J. Sedivy (1996). “Using eye movements to study spoken language comprehension: Evidence for visually mediated incremental interpretation.” In T. Inui & J. L. McClelland, (eds) Attention and Performance XVI: Information integration in perception and communication. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford Books.
You can use any search engine as a way to investigate and brainstorm, but I use Live Search: http://search.live.com
Part three: categories and metaphors
Two very readable books on categorization are (1) Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (2) Bowker, G. & S. Star (1999). Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lakoff's book on metaphors is also really great: Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
“Even the ameoba categorizes the things it encounters into food or nonfood, what it moves toward or moves away from. The amoeba has no choice as to whether to categorize; it just does.”
Lakoff, G. & M. Johnson (1999). Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and it Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books.
Part four: sentences
You can use Microsoft Word's built-in readability stats by running the grammar check--the final pop-up after the spelling and grammar are checked will show the Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level. For more information about using readability scores for “screening” text, see
http://www.gopdg.com/plainlanguage/readability.html. See also MacDonald, M.C. (1997)
Language and Cognitive Processes: Special Issue on Lexical Representations and Sentence Processing 12:121-399.
While I disagree with some of Steven Pinker's basic ideas about language, his book The Language Instinct is filled with interesting stuff. The discussion of passives and black holes can be found on page 228. Pinker, S. (1994) The Language Instinct. New York: William Morrow and Company.
Arnold Zwicky, a linguist at Stanford, does a lot of work on prescriptivist grammar marms and when his book on the subject comes out, it'll be worth getting. Grammar marms are a cranky bunch and just reading choice exerpts itself is fun (if infuriating since they spill ink on such a bunch of nonsense). You can also check him out at the
Language Log.
The analysis of the dative (and, yes, the scary linear regression model) come from Joan Bresnan and Tatiana Nikitina (2003). ”On the Gradience of the Dative Alternation”. See also Bresnan, J. (2006). "Is syntactic knowledge probabilistic? Experiments with the English dative alternation." Invited paper to appear in the proceedings of the International Conference on Linguistic Evidence, Tuebingen, 2-4 February 2006, Roots: Linguistics in search of its evidential base.. Series: Studies in Generative Grammar, edited by Sam Featherston and Wolfgang Sternefeld. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter Pdf. 21pp. (A4 paper size) Phew. Get them both at
http://www.stanford.edu/~bresnan/publications/index.html.
Part five: cognitive processing, tone, and context
“Listeners use many types of linguistic and non-linguistic information as soon as it becomes available to them, to infer the speaker’s intentions.”
Sag, I. & T. Wasow, to appear. "
Performance-Compatible Competence Grammar". In R. Borsley and K. Börjars, (eds)
Non-Transformational Syntax. (A lot of the cognitive processing literature is reviewed in this paper, which is relatively easy to read. This particular quote is on page 5.)
"Recent results have suggested that constructing an interpretation for a sentence involves the moment-by-moment integration of a variety of different information sources...The information sources include lexical constraints..., plausibility constraints...and discourse context constraints."
Gibson, E. (1998). “Linguistic complexity: locality of syntactic dependencies.” Cognition 68.1: 1–76.
Other processing factors come from personal correspondence with
Ivan Sag and
Philip Hofmeister. I don't have the complete references for all of these handy, but here are the basics (let me know if you need specific citations and I'll go get 'em).
"Context can mean many things; it might be the tasks that the system is being used to perform, the reasons for which the tasks are being carried out, the settings within which the work is conducted, or other factors that surround the user and the system. The context, though, is as much social as technical."
Dourish, P. (2001). Where the Action Is. Cambridge: MIT Press. (Sometimes Dourish takes trips down roads that seem like digressions to me, but he does have some really good ways of looking at design. This quote is from page 56.)
Though there isn’t a reference to UI, one of the clearest expositions about context is in Duranti, A. and C. Goodwin (eds.) (1992) Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon. Cambridge University Press.
Acknowledgments
Peter Leonard worked with our group a few years ago and he did excellent work looking at tone in various web services like Google and Flickr. I am indebted to his investigation and analysis.
I have also had the fortune to work with people like Nancy Bell, Sandy Hirsh, and Christine Anderson. These folks are researchers and usability experts who have helped look at how language creates experiences that are not just usable, but delightful.
I've also had the pleasure to work with Carla Saulter (who writes part-time for The Seattle Post-Intelligencer). Her work on UI writing basics was very instructive as I set out to think about what matters in UI writing and what doesn't.
Okay, there are a bunch of other people to thank, but I'm going to stop there lest the list get too long.
Some other (mostly fun) resources
I still need to give you folks an "authoritative" reference for the idea that "Title Caps Destroy People While sentence caps are easier to read". Meanwhile, maybe these things will occupy you.
Guidelines on language testing: http://corpus.linguistics.berkeley.edu/~kjohnson/quantitative/
My favorite thesaurus reference. http://thesaurus.reference.com/
A way to, among other things, see how words are link to one another. http://www.lexfn.com/
A reverse look-up dictionary. http://www.onelook.com/reverse-dictionary.shtml
A bunch of thesauri and classification systems in a bunch of different fields. http://www.lub.lu.se/metadata/subject-help.html
If you need a rhyme but don’t got no time. http://www.rhymezone.com/
Okay, this one has a thesaurus AND a dream dictionary. http://www.hyperdictionary.com/index.html