unity-design team mailing list archive

[Frederik Nnaji <frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Sep 4, 2010 at 04:31, Scott Kitterman <ubuntu@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> >I understand your position and i agree with most of it, too.
> >While we surely share the same opinion on much of what has been discussed
> >here, i am developing a mental model of how there can be a learnable,
> >consistent and semantically correct symmetry between command line
> interface
> >and graphical user interface..
> >
> >The foundation of my unborn brainchild is that a dialog is a dialog,
> whether
> >in a GUI or in the CLI.. perhaps i'm going too far with my thinking
>
>
> Text always appears in a context.


Agreed.


> Dialogue needs to work in the context it's presented.


Dialogue aka conversation consists of metaphors, which can be expressed and
read through various carriers, e.g.
* text
* symbolic icons
* color (green vs red, saturated vs unsaturated etc)
* sound
* movement (vibration on mobile devices)

Text is one way to deliver the content of a message. If the text is well
designed in its semantic root, it doesn't really matter what other carrier
we translate it to, since the translation will always relay the intended
message correctly in its respective context..


> Part of the context is that provided by the user. Part of it is the visual
> context.


My bad, i was comparing father and son, apt and update-manager.
I should have suggested a text based symbolic dialog mapping of
update-manager, instead of fumbling with its parent, which it extends.


> So because the target CLI user is somewhat different than the target GUI
> user and because the presentation and interaction are also different it's
> quite reasonable we would want different text.
>

thank you for your patience in this conversation, it helped me understand
some deeper conflicts that exist in certain areas..
My personal conflict was with the concept of a "target audience"..
Perhaps i will just read that as "target use case" from now on.