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In this video, we are going to talk about mental models,
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and the questions that we are going to tackle here are:
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“What makes an interface learnable?“ and “What leads to errors that people make in user interfaces?”
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And to do that, I’d again like to start with an example from the physical world.
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Here we are outside the Computer Science building at Stanford.
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And what I’d like to show you is an example of a user interface error.
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It’s really simple one: Our department and its front door has two doors.
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It both have exactly the same handle on them. However, the door on the right never actually opens.
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So, if I go to use this door right here, 24-hours-a-day 7-days-a-week it never works — it’s locked!
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So why does it have the same handle as the other that does open?
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And you can see right here that a whole lot of people have tried using this handle.
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In fact, faculty who have been around for years
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still often make the mistake of grabbing the wrong door.
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This would be a whole lot better if this door had no handle here.
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You could still exit — you can see this part right here —
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but if want to enter, you would know where to grab and which door to use.
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Let’s say you’ve got a refrigerator,
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and the problem is that he freezer is too cold, but the fridge is all just right.
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This refrigerator has two dials: One of them is labelled A through E,
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the other is labelled with numbers, 3 through 7.
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and there’s an instruction manual
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that lists combinations of letters and numbers for different settings of food.
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So what do we do to have the refrigerator stay the same, but the freezer to be less cold?
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Well, the action is going to depend on the mental model that you have of the system:
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One reasonable model that you could have is that there are two cooling units,
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and there’s one dial that controls each of the units.
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And, in that case, what you would want to do
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is [to] figure out which of those is connected to the freezer and tweak that dial.
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[It] turns out that’s not actually how it works: That there’s only one cooling unit in this refrigerator,
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and then it has a splitter which controls the proportion of cold air
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that goes into either the refrigerator or the freezer.
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And so, if you’d like to be abe to change only one of the two chambers —
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in this case: make our freezer less cold —
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what you have to do is [to] move both of the dials —
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dial back the total amount of coldness going into the refrigerator,
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and then change the fraction
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so that the fridge still gets the cold air that it needs but the freezer is getting less.
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If a lot of users misunderstand the functions of these two dials and get them wrong,
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then I think it’s fair to say that this is a poor user interface.
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There’s a lot of ways that you could fix this.
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Pause the video and think of a few of how you might make this refrigerator interface better.
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Here’s a couple that I came up with:
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One is if the user believes that one dial controls the fridge and the other dial controls the freezer,
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you could have the functionality of the system work that way —
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that you’d have two blowers, one for each.
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You could also simulate two blowers, by having computation in the middle
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and still have the dials connected one for each of the two.
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Alternatively, if you really felt like it was essential
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to have the “total cold plus changing the fraction” model,
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which is probably not as good a user interface but might be needed for cost reasons,
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in that way you could think of a way to have
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a diagram or other kind of cue that would explain better what was going on rather than cryptic text.
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In all of those cases, the goal is for the user interface to beacon to the user
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what the mental model that they should think about the system with is.
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And, of course, as you interact with the system more, your model becomes more sophisticated.
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But there’s a big pitfall and a danger of being a designer:
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You’ve spent so much time with the system that you know it works under the hood
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and you how you imagine other people will think about it.
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But your expertise can be crippling: The mental model that you expect users to have —
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you expect it to be the same as yours — just often doesn’t pan out in practice.
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And that’s one of the reasons why it’s really important to get real people who are not the designers
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in front of interfaces as soon as possible —
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to help you discover those differences between your mental model and theirs.
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And the benefits of aligning the user and designer mental models are obvious:
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Because when you have this mismatch, that can often lead to slow performance,
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or errors, and frustration on the part of the user.
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Where do these mental models come from? Well, that’s a fascinating question,
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and one that deserves a longer answer than I can offer in this short video.
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But I can say a few things to get you started:
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The first is that people reason about new interfaces
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by analogy to old interfaces that they’re more familiar with.
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And when can leverage that — when you can figure out what people are familiar with —
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and use those metaphors intentionally in the construction of new interfaces,
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you’ll often be really successful.
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So, for example, if you can say that a word processor is like a typewriter,
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then people will transfer their believes and skills with the typewriter over to the new word processor.
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The models that we build that guide our action: We have about our behaviour, of other people’s,
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of objects, of software — really anything and anybody that we interact with.
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But that’s not to say that everything is tidy and organized upstairs:
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Our mental models are incomplete; they’re inconsistent; they change over time;
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and they’re often rife with superstition.
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The second thing that I’d like to talk about today
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is two important different kinds of errors that are based on the user’s mental model.
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The second thing that I’d like to do today is to distinguish two important categories of errors
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that are based on differences in what the user’s mental model is about what they believe.
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The first category is a slip.
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With a slip, you have the right model of how a system works, but you just accidentally do the wrong thing.
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So, if I go to reach for one button and press another — just by a motor error — that would be a slip..
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On the other hand, a mistake is when I do what I intend to do,
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but I have the wrong model of what I ought to do.
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So, if I’m driving, and I think that I ought to take this highway exit to get [to] where I need to go,
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and I take it exactly as I intend to, but I was wrong in my belief, that would be a mistake.
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And, as a designer, you’ll correct these two kinds of errors — or prevent them — in your design differently.
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Slips you’ll most often try to prevent by improving the ergonomics
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or visual design of the user interface —
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spread things out so it’s less likely that you’ll hit the wrong thing;
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make targets bigger.
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With mistakes, on the other hand, what you’ll need to do is [to] provide better feedback,
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or make clear what the options are.
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So, limit the number of mistakes that you [could] make.
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You’ll want to improve the user’s ability to perceive the affordances of your software:
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Make it clear to them what is possible to do.
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Here we have an interface that led to a lot of user errors.
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This is a ballot from Palm Beach County, Florida during the 2000 presidential election in the US.
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There were two major party candidates —
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the Republican candidate George Bush and the Democratic candidate Al Gore.
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Across the nation they were, overall, running neck-in-neck.
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There were also eight other candidates, to each gathered a smaller fraction of the vote.
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A user’s vote was recorded by a hole being punched out along the centreline of the ballot.
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It appears that, due to bad user interface design,
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people who intended to vote for one of the candidates, Al Gore,
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instead, accidentally pressed the hole corresponding to a different candidate, Pat Buchanan.
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While we’ll never know for sure, the data suggested that this is probably the case.
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So, the people who vvoted in Palm Beach County using this ballot style,
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about 0.85% of the votes were for Pat Buchanan.
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However, people who voted absentee, using a different style of ballot,
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had a much lower rate of votes for Pat Buchanan,
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and the reason appears to be that this hole in the middle right here was ambiguous —
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Yes, there’s an arrow pointing to it from the right, but it kind of lines up to the spot on the left.
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So, it appears that for about 0.6% of voters,
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they thought that that second hole corresponded to Al Gore rather than Pat Buchanan.
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And the question for you is: Is this a slip? or is this a mistake?
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These erroneous votes are the result of a mistake,
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because voters performed the manual operation that they intended to perform —
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punching that second hole —
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however, they had the wrong mental model about what punching that second hole meant.
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WIth better user interface design, it could have been clear
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which of these was the hole that corresponded to a Democratic candidate versus the Reform candidate.
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Another important lesson to learn from the butterfly ballot problem is that of consistency:
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Whenever we reuse designs that are already successful, we are less likely to make accidental mistakes.
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By contrast, as happens with a lot of voting systems,
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when every county makes their own voting system
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— or at least there’s broad diversity in the voting systems used —
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it’s much more likely that usability bugs will crop up.
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And so one way that we could fix this would be to have a nationwide standard voting system
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where everybody votes using the same user interface.
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One appealing option for a nationwide voting system would be to use electronic voting.
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If we were to build a better user interface for voting, what would it be?
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Well, given that we’re in a computer science class,
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one natural suggestion to offer up would be electronic voting.
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And electronic voting certainly has some very clear appeals:
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For example, it is much easier to internationalize to many different languages;
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You can have pictures of candidates to make things clear;
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You can have a touch screen so that you have direct manipulation.
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All of these are important and good advantages to electronic voting.
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However, as David Dill in the Verified Voting Foundation point[s] out,
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there’s one major problem with electronic voting:
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How do you know that the machine recorded the vote that you intended?
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And their proposed solution to this user interface problem is really clever:
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What they proposed is that the machine print out a paper receipt of the vote that you cast;
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however, you don’t get to take the receipt with you, because that would run the risk of vote-buying.
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Instead, that receipt falls behind a glass or plastic clear pane,
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and so you can see it being printed out, and you can see it go into a bin,
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and it’s stored there for the purposes of recount.
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That way, you can always manually verify the computer-generated tally.
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The butterfly ballot costs problems because the representation was really confusing —
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What lined up with what was hard to figure out.
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Here’s an example that’s much better:
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This is a seat user interface for an automobile that employs a “world in miniature” strategy.
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It offers controls for manipulating parts of the seat,
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and the interface for doing that is a miniature seat itself.
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So, if you’d like to move the headrest back, you can move the miniature headrest back.
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By having this clear mapping, users are much less likely to make errors.
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So far, we’ve seen how direct manipulation enables users to behave with much more expertise
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by leveraging familiar real-world metaphors.
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This “directness in real-world” metaphor — like “to move a slider you move a slider” —
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helps give users a good idea of how each object works and how to control it.
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And also, the interface’s physical form discloses what functionality it provides.
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So this is all great, right? Well, here’s the challenge:
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The reason that we have technology and software as opposed to the real world that we used to have
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is that we want to be able to do something new!
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So, the reason that have a digital slider as opposed to a physical slider
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is that, at least somewhere in the system, there’s some kind of new functionality being offered.
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And so, as Jonathan Grudin points out,
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if technology is providing an advantage — if there is this new functionality —
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at some point, the correspondance to the real world has to break down.
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So this gap between the new technology and the current practice is necessarily going to be there.
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But your goal, as a designer, is to minimize this distance as much as possible.
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One of my favourite examples of a user interface
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that has this property of offering new functionality but minimizing the distance to current practice
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is the system for DJ’s called “Final Scratch.”
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This is a photograph that [inaudible] Hartman took,
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and what you see here is that the DJ is operating two turntables,
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much as one would do with normal vinyl.
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The difference is that this is special vinyl: It has a code on the record,
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and that code is being used to control a Linux system that you see on the laptop off on the left.
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And so, as opposed to the record playing music that’s piped out to the speakers,
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the record plays a code to the computer, and the computer plays the music to the speakers.
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So why is this a good idea? Well, there’s a couple of reasons:
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One, it means you can play anything, not just something that’s been produced into vinyl.
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Another one is that you only have to carry two record[s], not 200.
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And, more generally, it gives you all of the benefits of digital music
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like, you can produce it in the morning and play it that evening —
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you don’t have to wait several months for production to happen.
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When used well, physical interfaces
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that leverage people’s dexterity, manual abilities, and intuitions about the physical world
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can be incredibly powerful.
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These physical interfaces can also yield an experience that’s more fun to watch,
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which, if you’re a DJ, is really important.
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And, finally, here’s some resources
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if you’d like to learn about mental models, errors, and butterfly ballots.