NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #27/NN_1992_27.iso/spool/comp/humanfa/2721

Internet Message Format | 1992-11-23 | 2.7 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!olivea!gossip.pyramid.com!pyramid!unify!dbrus!ceb
From: [e-mail] (Caroline E. Bryan)
Newsgroups: comp.human-factors
Subject: Re: Seperation of Church and Elevators
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 23 Nov 92 19:52:55 GMT
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
Sender: [e-mail] (news admin)
Organization: /usr/lib/news/organization
Lines: 42

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Bruno Bassi) writes:
>
>No matter how arbitrary the coding between an interface representation or
>action and the thing it represents or the action it stands for, you can
>*always* with some effort find some sort of "explanation" or mnemonic trick
>for it.  But besides the one you find, there may be other interpretations
>that come quite naturally to other people's minds, and that are misleading.
>If we are not to confuse the user, we have to look for a coding that has the
>fewer number of possible interpretations associated to it.
>
>Take a case in which I have to enter a number as a parameter ... I get a
>small box with the default value, and ... two arrows pointing up and down.
> ... "push the up arrow to increment the number (to get a higher one), and
> the down arrow to decrement it.... I do exactly the opposite ... I tend to
> imagine natural numbers disposed in a vertical row, like this:
[vertical string of numbers, 0 at top, values going up as numbers go down]
>For this particular case, I think that a horizontal representation, with
>"left" and "right" arrows, would do much better. I find it natural to think at
>the "right" direction as the direction where things increase (probably
>because texts grow rightwards)....  Any comments?

Of course.  Several languages "grow" from right to left; and a few "grow" top
down.  Finding a horizontal number string increasing rightward is "natural"
to someone from a Eurocentric culture, but it is no more "natural" per se
than leftward increase or even boucephalic increase (which is only "natural"
in ancient Greek, I think).  IMO it seems much more sensible to expect a
higher number to be placed higher in a vertical string, and a lower number to
be placed lower, e.g.
    ...
    5
    4
    3
    ...
Perhaps if you evaluated why you expect a higher number to be lower, and a
lower number to be higher, you could become able to handle a vertical string
in which higher numbers are higher and lower ones lower.


Carrie        [e-mail]    x6244     ----------------------------+
|  There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.     |
|                       --     Mark Twain              |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+