They demonstrate, however, principles of the power of distributing cognition —
That absolutely have real world impact.
One great example of this is that task management system Getting Things Done.
It’s very much designed in the principles of distributing cognition in mind.
So, for example, one of the rules of the Getting Things Done system is that
whenever something comes to your mind that you need to do,
the first thing you do is write it down — somewhere, anywhere.
And the reason for that is that if you have something in mind
that needs to be completed and you haven’t written it down yet,
you’re spending a lot of cycles of working memory, remembering to “I need to do my laundry”,
the same thing — “I need to do my laundry”, “I need to do my laundry”…
and that’s chewing up resources that could be better deployed elsewhere.
“Write it down” gets it out of your mind, and you can move on.
One of the words that people toss around all the time in terms of effective user interfaces
is that “this user interface is ‘natural.’”
And when we say that, we mean a couple of different things,
but one of the things that we mean [that] we can see in our example of the oranges and the bagels
[is] that the bagels, as a task, is more natural — because the properties of the representation —
bagels can stack — matches the properties of the thing that’s being represented.
One of my user interfaces for this perspective is the Proteus indigestible pill.
This is a pill that, when you swallow it,
it sends out a little signal so that your phone — or the Internet — knows that you’ve taken this pill.
And the ability of keeping track of whether you’ve taken the pill or not automatically, by virtue of taking the pill,
is a really natural user interface —
the ingestion act serves both to take the pill and to mark that you have done so.
There’s another example of a really natural interaction in this system which is
that, in addition to the pill, there’s a transmitter that you need to stick to your body.
And the transmitter has a limited battery life.
So, how do you turn the transmitter on?
It’s a Band-aid-like system, and the way that you turn on the transmitter is
you peel back the Band-aid bandage, and that turns it on.
And so, again, that action that you need to do to stick it on yourself
is exactly the same action that you use to turn the [transmitter] on.
And so by integrating the necessary step with the step that’s easy to forget,
you don’t forget the step anymore.
So let’s bring this back to normal user interfaces.
Here’s an example of the Print dialog on a Macintosh.
And one of the things that you can see here is that there’s a world-in-miniature strategy in this Print dialog box.
So, if I want to look at the Stanford Academic Calendar, I can print that here.
And, what we’re going to look at is:
here’s our world in miniature, where we see the entire legal-sized page shown inside the dialog box.
And one of the things that that makes clear
is that I’m not going to be able to fit the top and the bottom of the page on a letter-sized page
because a letter sized page is three inches shorter than a legal page,
and so consequently, you know, it’s probably not something I want to do.
And, one of the things that I like about this is that by showing you the world in miniature,
the challenges of working that you’ve got to decide here become much clearer.
Here’s another example; this is from Microsoft Word, and what we can see here is —
I’m again about to print this, and the dialog box that I get from word says
“A footer of section 1 is set outside the printable area of the page. Do you want to continue?”
And I can click Yes or I can click No.
Now, in order to answer this problem, I need to know:
is it just that the bounding box of the footer is outside what the printer can print and so it’s irrelevant
or is there actually content that I need that won’t be printed?
None of that is available from this dialog box,
and so, unlike the previous print dialog
where we saw the world in miniature and could see what was being cut off,
here we have no idea what’s being cut off,
and consequently, this is a much less effective user interface.