Deb Rrose

Deb is a Human Factors Engineer. You can contact her at mailto:debrrose@whoever.com

She is trying to figure out how to communicate User Interface design in a manner that makes good solutions both understandable to the various players involved, and reusable. Use Cases don't quite cut it, and code reuse is close but not quite on target. So... looking for conferences and information on patterns and pattern language. Looks like there are a lot of good discussions in the wiki world.

Basically, the challenge is to find a repeatable and standardized way of communicating chunks of the visible User Interface between the users and the programmers, between members of design teams, between sets of design teams, and between projects. (There is a good paper on User Interface pattern language at http://www.mit.edu/%7Ejtidwell/interaction_patterns.html)

The underlying problem is communication, in that the different groups have different world views and vocabularies. For example: the user says, "give me good error messages." The programmer says OK, "strike any key to continue," thinking of course that anyone would know this means it doesn't matter which key you press. The user says, "hmmmm... I see the Enter key, and the Tab key, but where's the Any key?"

So, if chunks and modules of the User Interface can be defined and described in a standardized and repeatable way, and then cross referenced in such a way that good solutions are easily retrieved when you describe a current problem, that will form a basis for a language and library where the various groups can point and say, "that's what I mean, let's do that again" instead of starting from scratch every time. The part about starting from scratch leads to the dreaded antipattern PickingAtScabs.

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