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Use noun-verb task design rather than verb-noun.
This is taken mostly from Jef Raskin's site,
and Bruce Togazzini's First Principles.
Order the user's task (i.e. structure the interface) so that
the user selects the objects on which to act,
and then the action.
Jef Raskin describes a project where a requisition screen was designed
so that users chose the department where to goods were to be delivered to,
and then selected the items for delivery.
The department defaulted to the user's department.
Due to habit formation the users forgot to choose a department.
Forcing the users to always select a department (by not having a default)
was not a good alternative because it was annoying:
the users are thinking about the items, not the destination.
Raskin's solution was to move the department selection to the bottom of the
screen.
The users choose the items, and then the destination.
Selecting the destination is an act of closure:
having chosen the items, the user is now thinking about delivery.
Having the user choose the action before the object leads to modal interfaces.
While modes are not inherently bad, we should strive to minimise them in our
interfaces.
The classic "Find" dialogue is a case of verb-noun structured modal design.
This is typically a popup window that sits on top of the document window,
and sometimes (depending on the application or OS) allows focus in both windows.
The user must enter "Find" mode first, and then they may specify the
text to search for.
Once the item of interest has been found, the user must close the Find window
before they can edit the document
Instead of this style of "Find" (which seems to be ubiquitous in GUIs)
Raskin advocates an incremental search (a la Emacs) as a solution.
It avoids some of the other sins of the modal Find:
- Typos in the search string can go unnoticed until after the search
commences.
- Most searches cannot be interrupted.
- A failed search is reported with another dialogue window,
which the user must acknowledge and dismiss.
- Special characters such as Return and Tab cannot be included in the search
string.
Note that noun-verb ordering should also be applied to drop-down menus
and buttons.
In the "Tog's Principles" article Bruce Tognazzini's principle "Efficiency of
the user" tells us to use key words in menus and button labels.
So what are the key words?
They are the nouns that the user is thinking about acting on.
In Bruce's example, he changes:
Insert page break
Add Footnote
Update Table of Contents
to:
Insert:
Page break
Footnote
Table of contents
The user looks at the first word when they scan the list.
Insert/Add/Update are poor choices as first words because
(1) they occur often in many other contexts, and
(2) they are verbs,
so the user doesn't know what they are Inserting/Adding/Updating.
The solution is to put the noun first;
the user will identify the functions faster because
they only have to read the first word, not the entire phrase.
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