Reflections on information structures – mental effort and task appropriateness
One of the most typical and complex menus we use every day is the Start Menu. It contains large amounts of information which are not always logically organized. There are many use cases which apply to the Start Menu, often dependent on the available functionality. Typically, there are four types of activities associate with information retrieval from the Start Menu.
Finding a known application for a known task. For example, you know Photoshop is installed and it is appropriate for editing an image you want to put on your web page. This is a known-item information need which is most appropriately addressed by a search system or an index. Ideally it is a experiential task, however some reflection may be necessary for using the search system. A user who knows what they are looking for and has experience accessing it should be able to simply find their item without much mental effort.
Finding an unknown application for an known task. For example, you want to play a movie but do not know what application you can use. The information needs to be addressed are a mix between known-item needs and selective research. Search systems and indexes still work, however the user may not have enough information to easily use these methods. A filtering or winnowing approach to a collection of information will help the user narrow the information based on their previous knowledge until they find the desired result. This is a much more reflective activity than finding a known application for a known task, however the combination of the user’s known knowledge and the appropriate information structures should help reduce mental load.
Finding an known application for a unknown task. For example, you have installed RealPlayer on your computer because your friend said you need it, but you’re not really sure what it is for. This is similar to finding an unknown application for an known task, except the user has knowledge of different information. The point of both these scenarios is that users have small pieces of information to help guide them, which may or may not be enough to find what they are looking for without the aid of more complex, reflective tools. A combination of the right knowledge and right tools help makes these activities flow.
Finding an unknown application for an unknown task. For example, you want to browse the available system software in order to be more familiar with what is installed. This is an open-ended information need with no clear information selection goal. There are many information structures which help facilitate this: guides, hierarchies, search wizards, and methods which allow switching between searching and browsing. This is a reflective activity requiring the user to analyze and make sense of the given information in order to make a decision to proceed. Armed with little or no information to aid in searching, this is very involving activity.
The Start Menu is a hierarchical menu which categorizes applications to help users find them. There are many problems with this model, besides the fact that the Start Menu is traditionally poorly organized with no logical naming or categorization scheme. A hierarchy is very useful for open-ended and exploratory information needs, however those needs are not common in the user activities described. To navigate these hierarchies – especially when the labeling and organization is sub-optimal – requires users to stop and make decisions unnecessarily. If a user knows what they are looking for, why must they stop and think so much?
It is interesting to note that most of the scenarios do not suggest a hierarchical structures for addressing the common information needs. Our experience with the Start Menu may have faded our opinions about the difficulty of the menu structure, but the hierarchy we use every day is not the most optimal way to be interacting with our information. Yes, the information is logically categorized and the hierarchy is a valid organizational method. The point is not of the organizational accuracy, but of the appropriateness of this structure. It does not account for the user’s information needs in any way and forces them to use an inappropriate and unnecessarily complex structure to accomplish their tasks. As a result, many of these experiential or slightly reflective activities require more mental effort than necessary.
References:
Norman, D. Things That Make Us Smart. Addison-Wesley, 1993.
Paul, C. Study of Desktop “Start Menu” Usability. University of Baltimore, 2006.
Rosenfeld, L. Information Needs Analysis. LouisRosenfeld.com, December 03 2002.
seele :: Sep.07.2006 :: Design, General, HCI :: 9 Comments »
Good writeup. However, I think the activities could be further refined. Consider the the following use cases, inspired by yours.
Starting a known application for a known task. You already know that you want to start it, to solve the problem, so actually “finding it” is not important to you. What does this imply? Well if we stretch the word “finding”, it could imply finding it to read about it, finding it to remove it, upgrade it etc. Starting it requires less, actually for some users calling for it (by alt -f2 and typing the name for example) is faster and easier.
Solving a known task. The task is known - for example playing the movie you mention. You likely already have the movie file - now you just want to play it.
Finding a known application for an unknown task. I think this use case is interesting - in this case you it is as likely that you want to read some description about the application as it is that you actually want to start it. In this use case I think it is important to give the user more information than is available in current start menus.
Finding an unknown application for an unknown task -applied to current start menus, I guess it involves looking at each menu and wondering “what is this for and could it be of use for me”? Discovering software in the system is certainly useful. Note that current start menus only reveals a small subset of all available programs, and little to no information what problems they can solve. Also, command line programs are seldom available, nor are web services that could be helpful to you.
I think hierarchical menus are poor for each of these tasks!
Frankly, I avoid the K menu (as it presently exists in KDE 3.5) for most everything. I’ve bound most window-handling shortcuts to Win+[key], and I reserved Win+Alt+[key] for launching applications. W+A+F for Firefox, W+A+M for KMail, W+A+V for vim, etc. Less frequently used programs like OpenOffice get a launcher on the desktop. There’s even Win+Break for logout, so I don’t have to touch the menu for that either. And there are parts of the K menu I’ve never touched, such as the supposed “quick browser”. Cool hack, but what good is it? That’s what I have Konsole on a hotkey for.
What I’m saying, I think, is this: I interpret the K menu as damage, and route around it.
Distances,
Distance in time, in effort, in nuances and moods.
going up ladder just one floor has the same distance
that going down the same ladder.
The Same space distance, different time and effort distance.
btw, i hate going up sometimes =/
Sometimes i like learn/play about linguistics and there is the
morphix distro. more often i want only surf internet, and
there is no need to take any particular distro ( but i prefer konqueror anyway =) )
Again, some distance from one place to another.
Having things near is good, having too many things too near
is not.
Good Job Celeste!
Best Regards.
Great discussion! Just as a note, this reflection was not directed towards the KMenu, but more towards the menu metaphor which we (Windows, KDE, Gnome) have been using for the past 10 years without any thought to the actual structure of the information. The point is that there are very specific types of information needs these menus try to address, but their actual structure is not the most appropriate for facilitating the completion of various activities. Objectively this seems like a big problem which of course needs fixed, but subjectively that means changing a menu system metaphor millions of users have been used to for years.
I’m having a hard time interpreting the third comment however, it almost got marked as spam ^_^;
Given the current state of hardware, are there known structures that would work better to facilitate the completion of the various activities that the menu metaphor is not the most appropriate for?
Or are we just identifying the fact that the menu metaphor is not the best and then moving on to look for other structures?
The structures I describe are not datastructures in the sense of implementation. They are conceptual information structures or design patterns which are known to work well for certain types of needs and no so well for other needs.
The current menu information structure is a hierarchy of items which are not visible until the user traverses the structure. This kind of information structure for many of the needs I described is not the most optimal for meeting those needs.
Hierarchies are OK for open-ended searching — browsing — however not necessarily OK for other types of searching, such as those which the user has some knowledge of what they want, but not enough information to confidently navigate directly to it.
The other part of the analysis was looking at the types of cognitive modes used when accessing these menus. For the most part, they should be fairly experiential, especially after the user has good knowledge of the state or contents of the menu and only needs visual cues to help them navigate to what they want. When less knowledge about an item or less information is available, it is much more reflective and requires more comparison and reflection of the information in order to navigate through the menus.
By looking at the menu this way, it seems to be that the combination of typical activities and the current information structure makes usage more reflective than necessary resulting in higher cognitive mode. The jist of it is the menu in most cases should not require so much work to use, and the current information structure is requiring more mental work from the user than what other information structures may require.
Sorry, I’m a typical developer, I suppose.
What I’m thinking is, “OK, menus aren’t the best information structure to use to perform some of these tasks. Do we know what are?”
Once we know what they are then we can implement them.
Or perhaps even reorganizing the menu system, bad as it can be, would result in less reflection and lower cognitive mode.
Silly simple-minded pragmatic developer :-)
hi there!
While a discussion of a start menu is worthy, my comment is a bit outside of it. I believe as we do our work, we should be oriented towards the document rather than the application. Opening an application, then searching for your document is dumb (assuming most of our work is modification). I’d rather go to my project workspace be it a virtual desktop or a simple folder and start my work from there. There needs to be a good association between mime types and applications.
I don’t even like the “open a document” metaphor. I just want to go to my workspace, bring my documents into focus, and have several tools appear on the side that i can use to make modifications. This working style would also apply to non-modification work like web browsing, rss reading, movie playback.