INFO 202 Fall 08 Blog

The article that we read for Tuesday, “The Vocabulary Problem in Human-System Communication,” showed that you need at least 10 aliased terms for a referent before untrained people can reliably select it.

It’s easy to imagine how this might work in the command-line environment: a system designer picks a command and gives it the arbitrary authoritative term “delete” (for example). People who type “delete” at the command line will access this command. But we can easily toss in some aliases so that people who type “remove,” “trash,” “eliminate,” “wipe”, etc. will be referred to the delete command. This same idea can be applied to a GUI, but what would it look like?

One possibility might be something similar to what you see in OS X 10.5’s help menu. Starting in Leopard you can search for menu names in the help box and the system will visually point to where they are in the menu hierarchy. This way if you know a command is called “Crop” but you can’t remember where it is, the system will show you. Here’s a screenshot:

Although the menu search currently only matches literal strings, it’s not hard to imagine it working by matching your search against aliases for commands. You search for “trim” or “cut edges” and the system suggests the crop menu. (Ignoring for the moment that trim happens to be a separate command in, e.g. Photoshop). Application designers would have to do some simple research to see what aliases would best serve users.

There are definitely other ways to implement this idea, but this seems like one simple way to put research into practice.