real world columns: terminology

I always emphasize that user interface design is not just about the big things like screen layout, user models, information structures and so on, it also includes the little details. Sometimes even the choice of a single word in the interface can greatly influence its use.

The most telling examples come when a wrongly chosen word introduces a new concept. This is fine if it is a concept that plays a part in the user interface, but sometimes a bad choice of terms can introduce a spurious concept that leaves the user confused.

Consider a MiniDisc sound recorder I once used. Each time you recorded you created a block of sound on the disk. The user interface allowed you to skip through and manipulate the blocks with functions like next, previous, play and delete. All very simple and intuitive, but then in the middle of it all was a button labeled ‘mark’. Immediately the model became unclear, and questions were raised: What was a mark? What could the user do with it?

Experimenting with it eventually yielded the solution; if you put a mark in you actually split the block into two blocks at that point. Marks were already inherent in the system as the points where one block ended and another started, but they were not explicitly referred to and, as the user model was based on the blocks, a better term would have been ‘split block’, a recognizable action carried out on the existing concepts.

As a less extreme example the Macintosh desktop interface uses something called a ‘clipboard’ for that limbo place where things are in-between a cut and a paste, but the functionality is a lot less than the name suggests. In the real world I don’t think I’ve ever used a clipboard when I’ve cut something out and pasted in into another place. I always hold it in my hand. Still ‘clipboard’ is a far better choice than ‘buffer’ which to most non-technical people means the big things at the end of the rails that stop trains crashing. Obviously not a great place to keep important chunks of information!

The people who really invest time into choosing terms are the marketing agencies when they are naming a new product. The choice of the name ‘Prozac’ for the infamous pharmaceutical product was a huge process. The creatives wanted a name that what easy to say, it had to have an up-beat, positive ring to it, thus the ‘pro’ part at the beginning. It had to sound modern and technological so they stuck a Z in it (how many software companies stick a Z or an X in their name!) and they wanted an image of progress, of forward motion so they put the ‘ac’ part in. After weeks of work they created a household name. I sometimes wonder what it could have been, what were the names they tried and rejected? ‘Pozgo’ or ‘Pluzprog’, maybe even ‘Goodzoom’.

Contrast this attention to detail with the ‘Lymeswold’ problem (pronounce it so it rhymes with ‘times - cold’). A new type of soft cheese made in the south of England with the goal of breaking into the French cheese market. After several years of poor sales they did some research and discovered that indeed it did have exactly the right English countryside connotations that they wanted. But the problems lay in the fact that the average French person couldn’t actually pronounce the name, making it very difficult for them to buy it or order it in shops. A clear case of not taking the user into consideration in the design process.

Terms also play a key part in supporting navigational signs. In British hospitals the navigation is based upon the obscure Latin terminology used by the medical profession. The end result is that the doctors who work there all the time understand them (but never need them) while the real clients, the people who are ill, have to spend ages puzzling out which antiquated Latin name means ‘back problems’ or ‘eye department’. There has actually been research carried out on how recognizable the terms are and for some terms less than ten percent of the people understand them.

But my favorite strange terminology was that I encountered while browsing a CD-Rom library index system. All of a sudden I hit upon a paper entitled: ‘Graphical presentation using fish’… ‘Fish?’ I thought, and had this wonderful image of computer graphics labs full of researchers trying to keep piles of trout and salmon cold on the cooling units of a Cray. Then I discovered that the system truncated the titles and happened to have broken this one off in the middle of ‘fish-eye projections’!