cut and paste
interesting words
Fuzzy search
Learning systems
Sharable Courseware Object Reference Model
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IxD mail titled: “umbing it down and ease of use….”
There is a good argument against this ‘dumbing-down’ rhetoric: every task has a certain basic complexity. For instance, there is a basic amount of complexity to writing an essay, independent of whether you support that task with a pen and paper, a manual typewriter, or a word processor.
Good design ensures that the support for a task increases its complexity only minimally beyond it basic complexity. Bad design tends to increase the complexity of a task a whole lot more.
SAS has some risk here - they have a very thin line to walk between making a great interface that enables statisticians to exercise their
(significant) expertise and trying to make statistical analysis more accessible to the masses by covering up some of the inherent complexity of statistical techniques. (I don’t know how much this applies to their database querying software, but I have seen this pressure at work in their statistical products.)
Gary Klein (www.decisionmaking.com) has a great talk related to this, called “How to Make People Stupid”. In it he talks about many cases in which designers tried to mask the basic complexity of tasks in their software. This made it easier for novices to do their work but effectively stopped expertise from forming. For instance, he talked about software given to weather forecasters that aggressively smoothed pressure gradient data (i.e., the stuff forecasters use to find fronts). This made fronts appear as lines, which helped novice forecasters but hindered experts, who had learned to make different judgments about the types of weather occuring based on the spacing and arrangements of pressure dots.
Still, for better or for worse, there will always be business pressures that compel us to make ‘expert’ tasks accessible to the masses. The challenge is how not to sell your soul in the process. 
-Gerard
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some links
Listmania! Books on Information Design
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C:\>pscp c:\ai.zip brijesh@yoda.dreamhost.com:/home/.gargamel/brijesh/b-ve.com/upload
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METHODS:
http://www.uie.com/events/uiconf/articles/five_second_test
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Personal info cloud:
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