[cap-talk] User interface discussion

[ihab.awad at gmail.com]

On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 6:10 PM, Raoul Duke <raould at gmail.com> wrote:
> which makes me wonder, since documentation is always the first thing
>  to be lacking, who will be giving capabilities really good descriptive
>  text (and localizing it)?
>  http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/treecomicbig.jpg

[ha]

If you have designed your system using clean OOUI principles, then you
have decomposed the problem to objects in the end-user's information
model, and presented these objects as affordances that the end-user
can directly manipulate.

Each capability is then either such an object, or a facet attenuating
the authorities that the object represents (hence, "the [geographic
location] of the [house]" or "the [salary] of the [employee]").

One would hope that by composing the descriptions this way, where
every atomic piece of the description is built by someone who is an
expert in that specific object being described, the user would see a
consistent "grammar" that they could understand.

That is, of course, the optimistic view. The pessimistic one is that
we would be inventing a dialect of Entish.

Ihab

-- 
Ihab A.B. Awad, Palo Alto, CA