I enjoyed Richard A. O'Keefe's treatise on name representation in class objects:
"People don't have names. Instead there is a *relation* between people and names."
This touches a little on my concerns about Graphics User Interface representation. Please excuse any of my lack of insights for Ive a psychology degree and work as a programmer. [A *real* Computer Analyst] ;)
Why is there no persistent class representing the user in total? Shouldnt there be something at the Kernel level? Why is such a person only represented by keyboard strokes and Hand Morphs? Isnt the most cherished person in our programming life, the "user", more than an I/O port?
A person has memory, a unique place and time, a skill level, a purpose, a single focus or locus of attention at any moment, modes of communication across devices, learning styles, personality types, and limitations to the above (among a few other things...). Every sent communication and every stored data element has a purpose for a person or a group which is most often lost in todays data representational systems. A person is also a member of several groups for which that person shares an identity an which act as a proxy on their behalf.
All this relates directly to the data use and functionality of any application.
People dont _have_ fingers. Instead there is a *relation between what people want and what their fingers do.
People dont _have_ eyes. Instead there is a *relation* between what they see, what they remember from what they see, what they know.
They quickly shift their focus or locus of attention over time. They imagine half of what they see by filling in from memory. They focus on juxtapositions both of whats similar and what contrasts. They compare what they see to a cognitive map or mental heuristics of what they expect. They give attention to the information that has an emotional impact on themselves.
Why dont we create class hierarchies of our GUIs to match the already researched rules of cognitive science?
At this point I should say But there's also a simple solution." But I cant. The best I can do is refer you to a more detailed exploration of the topic in Jef Raskins The Humane Interface http://humane.sourceforge.net/humane_interface/hollands_review.html
Certainly Squeak with its OOP methodology could get us there and gain notoriety in the process.
Cheers, Darius
On Tuesday 29 April 2003 06:16 pm, Darius wrote:
Why don't we create class hierarchies of our GUI's to match the already researched rules of cognitive science?
Because strict hierarchies don't map well to the way people think about categories?
On Wed, 2003-04-30 at 03:16, Darius wrote:
Why is there no persistent class representing the user in total?
Squeak being a personal multimedia environment, it could probably be said that any image is some representation of the user.
Shouldnt there be something at the Kernel level? Why is such a person only represented by keyboard strokes and Hand Morphs? Isnt the most cherished person in our programming life, the "user", more than an I/O port?
Because that's the bit you're interested in. If there's one sure sign of an object modeller type gone wrong, it is that he starts modelling reality without constraining himself with actual needs. If you're a Morphic class library, really the only thing you are interested in are mouse movements (I wanted to type 'mouse gestures', but 40 years after Sketchpad we still don't have these....), not in whether the user is interested in Bach.
Note that you do the same. If you hand your credit card to a warehouse clerk, all you are interested in is where that clerk's hand is and whether it already has taken hold of the card so you can let go. You couldn't care less about his email address.
Why dont we create class hierarchies of our GUIs to match the already researched rules of cognitive science?
Because cognitive science tells us the domain is too complex to be modeled by simple class hierachies?
The best I can do is refer you to a more detailed exploration of the topic in Jef Raskins The Humane Interface http://humane.sourceforge.net/humane_interface/hollands_review.html
Best laugh I had in a long time, this article. The guy steps up and invents Emacs/Vim with a lot of fanfare.
Now, he's right about a lot of things, but he made himeself look like a fool for making it sound like he's invented something new.
Certainly Squeak with its OOP methodology could get us there and gain notoriety in the process.
As far as a 'multi-modal' interface is concerned, I do agree that Squeak relies a bit too much on the mouse alone. But also, I think that Squeak should have mouse gestures - there's a gesture recognizer in there after all, and I heard good reports on them. There's a lot of work to be done here...
squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org
-
Cees de Groot -
Darius -
Ned Konz