Gui Shorthand

Problem:

Software manuals are usually written for people with VisualLearner or AuditoryLearner styles. People with KinestheticLearner styles get left out.
Software manuals written for nontechnical people are usually too verbose for technical people to stand wading through.
Software manuals written for technical people leave out so many details that non-technical people cannot use them, because the manuals assume the readers know things that they don't.
Can we build a notation for directing people on how to navigate GUIs and Web sites that is terse enough for technical people, detailed enough for non-technical people and action oriented enough for KinestheticLearners?

Context

"It's frozen and we can't change it now" GUI, or
"I didn't write it - here are instructions on how to use it" manual, or
"I did write it; we can make it better; here is how to use it to get this job done for now" manual.

Forces

General purpose GUIs have many options for many different purposes.
To do a specific job, the user only needs some features of the GUI.
A separate document can help the user focus on what they need to do.
The user may need to do things in a certain order.
The GUI may not make it obvious what things need to be done to achieve a particular task.
The GUI may not make it obvious what order things need to be done in.
Most users don't have the power to redesign most of the GUIs they work with.
Many users have trouble understanding many GUIs.
In many cases GUIs can not be redesigned for financial reasons.
One of the dreams of user interface design is to have systems that will be best configured for each individual user.
- So far most user interfaces only have one format.
- There is not money to add more formats for more kinds of individuals.
- So any design will of necessity leave some substantial fraction of users in the dark.
- Someday we may each be able to configure our user interfaces so that they are efficient for each of us based on what works best for each of us.
- That day may be soon but it is not here yet.
- Until then an explicit way of telling us how to use user interfaces can help those people in the fraction left out.
People who are very smart when it comes to understanding how a GUI functions will say 'just look at the interface and figure it out from that'.
One of the problems that people who find something easy have, is that they have trouble comprehending that there are people who don't find it easy.

Possible Solutions:

Let us build a notation for directing people on how to navigate GUIs and Web sites that is both terse enough for technical people and verbose enough for non-technical people. This provides enough detail for a nontechnical person and enough terseness for a technical person.

ProgrammersGuiShorthand. Documents every command, not every keystroke. May be too terse for some users.
GuiActionTrace (SanguineGuiShorthand). Documents every keystroke; may be too complicated. May be just right for people with kinesthetic learning styles.
AsciiArtGuiShorthand

Resulting Context:

One nice feature of all of these GUI shorthands is that they do not need bold characters, italic characters, or other specially formatted characters.

The GuiActionTrace (SanguineGuiShorthand) is complicated and is designed primarily for KinestheticLearners. Anyone who understands it, probably would understand the GUI -- so it does not help many people who are not KinestheticLearners.

The ProgrammersGuiShorthand does not explain the mechanics of clicking on buttons, filling in dialog boxes, et cetera.

Would it be possible to create yet a workable GuiShorthand approach which does not have these two problems? Perhaps these two approaches could be combined.

Discussion

InductiveReasoningAptitude

Why do people need to be directed on how to navigate a GUI?

Many users and programmers have a very high level of InductiveReasoningAptitude. They probably don't need any guidance, and can figure out a GUI for themselves. For most other people who have a lower level of inductive reasoning, some guidance would be useful.

If they don't have the "level of inductive reasoning" required to navigate a GUI without guidance, will they have the "level of inductive reasoning" required to understand this short hand?

very very good point. Probably the form that inductive reasoning takes in a GUI is trying to understand what each icon and category (menu/menu item) means on every GUI you run in to.

In the case of the shorthand, what each symbol means only needs to be learned once. In the case of GUIs what each thing means needs to be learned for each (substantially) different GUI. Learning the GuiShorthand is probably just as difficult as learning a GUI, but it only needs to be done once.
Another difference, the GuiShorthand is for directing someone how to navigate rather than showing them the entire GUI at once. It shows people without a high inductive reasoning ability what to focus on. GUI's have a high level of detail, and processing detail is the main problem people have who do not have a high inductive reasoning ability.

I have come to realize that GuiActionTrace (SanguineGuiShorthand) is built to a large extent for KinestheticLearners. Since each symbol in the shorthand describes an action and since kinesthetic learners learn by taking actions, this makes sense to me. -- JonGrover

I would claim that while this is an undoubtedly laudable project, but [some of] the notations suggested above have, in my (admittedly limited) experience of users, a much higher entry level than the average GUI. In other words, I've never met someone who would both understand the [SanguineGuiShorthand] notation and find it useful, because if they would understand it, they would have understood the GUI. Perhaps your experience differs, yes?

I'm the only one I know --JonGrover

I'm trying to open the discussion again at GatCouldMakeGuisEasier, since there has not been any work on this page since 2003. Users have gotten smarter about computers over the intervening 6 years, so maybe it's time to reopen this discussion. Since then I have noticed that it really works well for tracing user actions.