SIGIA-L Mail Archives: RE: SIGIA-L: ZUI hatred
RE: SIGIA-L: ZUI hatred
From: Christopher Fahey [askrom] (askROM_at_graphpaper.com)
Date: Sun Mar 24 2002 - 21:07:10 EST
Christina wrote:
> So far it seems ZUI's are good for orienting and displaying
> certain kinds of relationships. They seem to fail when
> there is a lot of information.
Yes, ZUIs are somewhat useful for navigating 2-dimensional (i.e.,
planar) data sets. Examples include maps and photographs. Obviously the
ability to zoom in and out of a planar image/dataset is an essential way
of understanding the content of the image/dataset. Anybody could figure
that out.
Where ZUI advocates think they are clever is applying this mental model
to datasets that are not necessarily planar. Planar data is a highly
esoteric kind of data, where every "pixel" of data has a single X,Y
coordinate - that is, two facets. But most data have many facets,
sometimes hundreds.
Most of the examples so far in this discussion have focused on the ZUI's
advantage for navigating 2-dimensional planar data, which is not at all
what Raskin is talking about anyway! Raskin advocates the ZUI for
navigating content hierarchies. This strikes me as wrongheaded for two
reasons:
1) A ZUI exposes less information than a traditional simple tree control
heirarchy:
http://www.mmartins.com/ft/example/ftexample.html
In this example, if you zoom into "Ediburgh" you can still at least see
the "North America" option several levels above it. In a ZUI you can
only see the layers below you. Awkward flailing (pogosticking) becomes
essential.
2) A heirarchical structure is a singular, monolithic knowledge
organization system. Yet most digitally-stored knowledge is easily
organized into many different systems simultaneously. Foregrounding a
single heirarchy as the primary means of finding information in a
complex dataset, as a ZUI does, is to deny the user a more powerful
suite of tools.
Yes, I almost always advocate placing content within a browsable
heirarchy (or hierarchies), just so everything ultimately has a single
"home" in which it lives. This allows traditional "browsing" to maintain
a sense of "location", which is the whole point of the ZUI - that is, to
relate abstract data to concrete containing structures. It also allows
developers of content to rapidly assign the most important facets to a
chunk of data (for example title, author, subject).
For some kinds of data (for example articles in a daily newspaper with
International, National, Local, Sports, etc. sections) a
commonly-accepted hierarchical structure is very likely going to match
quite closely with a user's expectation of where data can be found. But
for data like that stores more complex information (such as that
contained in http://www.imdb.com) nobody could possibly agree on a
single, primary hierarchy for finding the many-dimensional information
stored within. A heirarchy isn't always the best or only way for finding
information in huge databases, especially not now that we have much more
powerful alternative tools.
The fact that stored knowledge needs to be contained in a concrete and
singular structure seems to me to be a legacy of a time when knowledge
actually resided in physical objects (i.e., books and papers) housed in
a physical structure (shelves and libraries). The Dewey decimal system
provided a system to locate Book X in a library. You couldn't have Book
X in ten different sections at once, so you had to have a single
hierarchical system so you could put the book *somewhere*.
-Cf
[christopher eli fahey]
art: http://www.graphpaper.com
sci: http://www.askrom.com
biz: http://www.behaviordesign.com
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