We use differing metaphors when we do different things on a computer. At various times we interact with shared documents, video chats, ebooks, augmented reality environments, software development tools, 3D modeling\/animation tools, computer games, science simulations, and so on, with each type of interaction implemented by another computer program.<\/p>\n
At any given moment, your computer screen might contain a video chat, a Google doc, an eReader program, and so on, all implemented as separate programs. Because of this separation, interaction between these programs tends to be limited.<\/p>\n
I suggest that this approach is ultimately a mistake. Once it has been decided that functionality should be split into separate bodies of software, many kinds of rich interactions between the underlying metaphors simply cannot be implemented.<\/p>\n
Google Wave was a noble and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to be a single integrated environment — an all-in-one program that does everything. I suspect Wave may have been trying too hard to be capable of doing absolutely anything one could ever think of.<\/p>\n
Suppose instead we were to approach such an integration first and foremost from the perspective of user-centered design. Rather than set out to build a software tool that “could do everything”, we might instead ask “what would the user of such an integrated tool actually want?”<\/p>\n
We then let the answers to that question guide our software design choices.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We use differing metaphors when we do different things on a computer. At various times we interact with shared documents, video chats, ebooks, augmented reality environments, software development tools, 3D modeling\/animation tools, computer games, science simulations, and so on, with each type of interaction implemented by another computer program. At any given moment, your computer … Continue reading “Wave theory”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9295"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9295"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9295\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9297,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9295\/revisions\/9297"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}