Sunday, October 25, 2009

On the importance of convention

What's going on in this picture? If you're from Todmorden, Lancashire, you'll probably know exactly what's up. If you're English or from some other place with a similar traffic system, you'll probably have a pretty good idea: Traffic keeps to the left, the triangles mean "yield", the arrows mean "go this way," of course, and the green circle is a mini-roundabout. If you're coming from the lower right, for example, and want to shift over to the inner roadway, you'll have to yield to anyone who might already be going round the green circle, then go round the green circle yourself to complete a right turn, yield to anyone on the inner roadway and turn left onto it.

All of this is encoded into the markings on the road, the little red triangular sign and, crucially, the minds of the road users who know how to interpret the markings. I should probably mention here that the road users in question are meant to be cyclists under the age of 12 and that grownup mini roundabouts are typically also clearly marked with arrows, not that everyone always takes notice.

To those of us on the other side of the pond, things might not be so obvious. The triangles are on the far side of the intersection if you're on the right, and they're pointing forwards, so maybe they mean "go on through"? The red triangle sign is maybe telling me the road goes around in a circle? The green circle on the road? No idea. Green means "go," maybe? That's consistent with the triangles. Better just blast through there as fast as I can. And keep right.

So what brought this on? I was looking at a revamped version of someone's web page. The page was mostly filled with a rectangular area containing text and figures. The space directly above that was divided into three rectangles, rounded on top, each containing a short phrase. One of the three was highlighted in a contrasting color. The other two highlighted (without unhighlighting the first) as the cursor went over them.

Nowadays most people will probably not have too much trouble figuring out what's going on. The rectangles are tabs, of course, the rollover highlighting reinforces "you can click on me" and clicking will change the contents of the large rectangle. All this is encoded in the shapes on the screen, the highlighting behavior and, crucially, the mind of the viewer who knows how to interpret these signs.

The tab convention, along with several other widely-used conventions, makes modern web pages considerably easier to use than older ones. From a coder's point of view these are not big technical innovations. They're considerably easier to implement now that browsers understand scripting languages, but they could also have been implemented with new HTML markup, and in any case scripting in browsers was envisioned (if not widely available) pretty early in web.history.

New user interface metaphors are innovations in convention much more than technical innovations. One thing that comes across in looking at old web pages is that there wasn't as much shared understanding of what a web page looked like, even though there were fewer choices of how a web page could look.

In no way does this mean that the web will soon be completely hidebound by convention. Traffic planners haven't completely figured out what road signs should look like, and roads have been around for a while now.

[After posting this, I remembered a story I'd heard about a young linguist doing field work (yes, real field work, not haphazard musings about the web). The linguist had learned a few basic phrases and was trying to find out more, and so pointed at a house and asked "What's this?". The local answered (let's say) blah. The linguist dutifully recorded that the word for house was blah. Pointing at a tree, the linguist again asked "What's this?". Again the answer was blah. "Interesting," thought the linguist, "They use the same word for 'house' and 'tree'." Elaborate hypotheses regarding meaning and metaphor began to spin.

Soon the linguist had discovered that
blah also meant "dog", "basket" and either "path" or "dirt". How could that be? After a bit confusion and hilarity (on the local's part), it eventually became clear that blah meant "index finger" and that people there pointed at things by pursing their lips in the appropriate direction.]

1 comment:

earl said...

Another good question is, "where do the conventions come from, and how do we learn them?" As near as I can tell few of them are imposed by authority. Many must be arranged by agreement among manufacturers associations and the like. In the US a vertically oriented toggle switch is assumed to be "on" if up, but the reverse was the case in Austria last time I was there. Who decided that the hot water was on the left, and turned anticlockwise to open, and v.v. for the cold? Who put the clutch on the left and the brake on the right? Is there a regulation? If so, where? In the digital world the conventions seem to be evolving like topsy: If something works, or seems cool, it is copied, and at some point becomes conventional.

A most useful thing would be an encyclopedia of conventions, if it could be made faster than it becomes obsolete. Wikiconvention? Does it already exist?