jamesinchina.com

We've recently been redesigning the home page of our software. It seems that, in general, people don't read anything that's on the screen, so we're redesigning all the buttons to have relevant icons. Google recently must have had a similar issue - the search side bar they added to the search results have recently sprouted little icons. "What side bar?", I hear you ask. Exactly my point - people don't have time to read anything.

Chinese people on the other hand love reading things on screen. Whilst the vast majority of English speaking will pick a search result from the top three presented most of the time, Chinese readers frequently scan to the bottom of the page, and onto the 2nd and 3rd pages. Chinese websites make my head hurt, nobody could possibly read that amount of text, right?  Challenge: can you find 'Download USB security key drivers' on this bank's website?

But because of the way that information is fitted so compactly into Chinese characters, native Chinese readers can read Chinese significantly faster than we can read English. Is this because of the pictographic nature of Chinese, or simply because the reader's eye doesn't have to move so far to cover the same amount of information?

To tell the truth, I don't know, but I am take in information more easily if it was presented pictographically.  Would a picture really be worth 1000 words? The artist Xu Bing created many such symbols in his Book From the Ground, claiming that he was inspired by native American totem poles, but I find some of them difficult to understand out of context. Perhaps we could combine his idea of communicating with symbols with the idea of domain specific languages (DSLs) and some knowledge of the way people learn new languages.  It might supply a better way of creating user interfaces for software (image the fluidity with which characters manipulate computers in Minority Report) and may be something like what Hesse was imagining in 'The Glass Bead Game'.

The basic functions of a piece of software would be represented using a DSL. For example, the DSL for education software will include the vocabulary items 'Teacher' 'Set Homework' 'Student' 'Mark work' etc. Each vocabulary term would be represented by a picture a la Xu Bing, and initially introduced to the user via buttons with both the vocab label and picture ('Mark work' along with a tick and clipboard, for example). Once the user has seen this collocation a few times, they will understand that the tick and clipboard represents marking work and the text label no longer needs to be shown. At that stage, strings of pictures representing more complex interactions can be used, or pictures can be composed into different pictures in the same way that Chinese characters are composed. The aim would be to build this up gradually as the user learns to use the software so that he will always recognize the meaning of any pictures shown to him. I think I will be experimenting with this approach over the next year or so within Schoolshape, perhaps for representing educational goals and outcomes.

What do you think?  Am I being hypocritical by typing this article and not spelling it out in little pictures?  People criticise programming languages such as Perl for being 'write only', ie, easy to write but far too abstruse to understand by other programmers.  Java is criticised for being verbose, ie time-consuming to write, but it is easier to read and therefore better for building larger systems which require long term modification and upkeep.  Perhaps pictograms may be the ultimate Java - typing text as I am now certainly is easier than drawing thousands of little pictograms, but in the end may not be to the best advantage of you, the reader.