Reading #3 Let's help the desingers

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Wenzhe Li

Summary:

The problem of similarity always confuses people and computer as well. However, it is difficult for interface designers to solve this problem by themselves. This paper provides a tool named “quill”, which will automatically give advices to designers when it thinks is necessary.

Based on the similarity metrics that the author built from three experiments, quill predicts when the similarity problem would occur and offers unsolicited warnings and advices to designers.

The author found interface challenges in three areas: when to advice, how much to advice and what to advice. During the implementation stage, the author chose different strategies for user-initiated and system-initiated analyses. And because of the similarity metric, quill inclines to overestimate similarity when dealing with letter related gestures.

Discussion:

The author shows almost all the matters of developing software: what is its aim, the challenges of interface, implementation and underlying model (not perfect in this case). I realize that there is many things to consider when developing a software rather than just finishing its core algorithm and then being happy and satisfied. The author concerned a lot about details, which may not be very interesting and exciting but still need thorough consideration.