[HN Gopher] The Use of Formal Representations in Interfaces (199...
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       The Use of Formal Representations in Interfaces (1999) [pdf]
        
       Author : pcr910303
       Score  : 49 points
       Date   : 2021-08-17 07:57 UTC (15 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (andymatuschak.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (andymatuschak.org)
        
       | troelsSteegin wrote:
       | Is this still true? I guess the question is when is an interface
       | concept "cognitive overload" - a bad formalism - vs serving as a
       | useful abstraction? Say that's grouping attributes into a named
       | cluster. Or, collecting actions into a function. As programmers,
       | great. As people scheduling appointments, maybe that's ok in some
       | workflow automation setting (which is not unlike programming) but
       | otherwise, not great.
       | 
       | What predicts the aptness or ineptness of a given formalism? It
       | has to begin with an idea of what the user already knows, and
       | with the fitness of the formalism to the user's concept of the
       | job to be done. Perhaps for the majority of the HN readership:
       | "Informality Considered Harmful".
        
         | gradschoolfail wrote:
         | Heh reading the article it is not clear to me what the
         | difference between abstraction and formalism is. If I have to
         | guess from the colloquial usage of the word, abstraction is
         | more about removing details, while formalism is about adding
         | elements/details which do not originate from the domain. Maybe
         | people often arrive at the same abstractions but formalisms are
         | often unique.
         | 
         | In your example clustering is probably an abstraction but the
         | rules for choosing names might be a formalism. Unsupervised vs
         | supervised learning is another comparison that this connotes..
        
       | tgbugs wrote:
       | Thank you for sharing this. It is somewhat staggering to come
       | across a paper that so perfectly captures that problems that one
       | encounters, and discover that it was written nearly two decades
       | before.
       | 
       | This is a comprehensive review of human factors affecting
       | interaction with nearly any "formal" system where "formal" means
       | anything from a color wheel to a prolog database.
       | 
       | I have repeatedly encountered these issues while working on a
       | formal language for specifying scientific protocols. I knew I had
       | my work cut out in terms of finding a way to create an interface
       | that non-expert users could work with, but this makes it clear
       | just how critical it is for the tools not to distract the user
       | from their expert thinking.
       | 
       | This poses and incredible design challenge, and that is without
       | any discussion of variability between users!
        
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       (page generated 2021-08-17 23:02 UTC)