Oct 272007
One of the largest deficiencies in most software interfaces lies in their poor use of semantic categorization. This is most clearly seen in windowed applications’ menu bars, where organization is done in several different ways (often inconsistently within the same application):
- organization by hierarchy of action, e.g. “Paste” goes under “Edit” because pasting is a kind of editing
- organization by hierarchy of things, e.g. “Layers” goes under “Window” because the layers dialog is a window
- organization by phrase completion, e.g. “Grid” goes under “View” because one views the grid
- organization by inverted/scrambled phrase completion, e.g. “Rotate 90 degrees” goes under “Image” because one rotates the image 90 degrees
- organization by free association, e.g. “Back” and “Forward” go under “History” because they are navigation links like a previous-site link is a navigation link
- organization by fuck all, e.g. “Preferences” go under “Help”, “Tools”, “Edit”, “File”, et al.
The hopeful thing about this problem is it suggests much software could be greatly improved simply by re-examining a few word choices and moving some menu items around. The discouraging thing about the problem is that getting semantics and categorization “right” is very, very hard and may in fact be an intractable problem (see Clay Shirky here and here).