Comments on: User Interaction 101

By: Ford Andrew Nickel, A.A.

Ford Andrew Nickel, A.A. — Mon, 26 May 2008 19:43:54 +0000

This is genius. I lurve you Andy.

By: Andy Matuschak

Andy Matuschak — Wed, 07 May 2008 17:49:06 +0000

You’re right, Alexander—the silent waiter has the greatest possibility of danger, but at the same time, it has the greatest possibility of awesome. If your waiter isn’t silent enough, though, you’ll see it instantly when you watch a user at work. It causes a lot of frustration.

Bret Victor has some rather radical ideas on this topic. They’re largely a pipedream, I feel, but they give me something to shoot for.

By: David Smith

David Smith — Wed, 07 May 2008 15:40:14 +0000

Another example is Adium’s spellchecking, which saves the language you use on a per-contact basis.

By: mvcoile

mvcoile — Wed, 07 May 2008 10:34:54 +0000

One word: Brilliant.

@Alexander: Though I agree with your example, but you may be over-smartening the waiter. You don’t have to have a degree in anything to be a waiter. A better example is the Safari download manager. You may not notice it, but that is just the point of the “silent waiter”. Try using IE on windows…

By: Alexander Repty

Alexander Repty — Wed, 07 May 2008 08:55:34 +0000

The one problem I see with the “silent waiter” is that it would have to be really, really smart. Take the automatic word correction on the iPhone, for example. When I’m typing a text message in German and I want to write “hey” as a greeting, it always tries to auto-correct it to “Hex” for some reason. No matter how many times I choose not to use the correction but what I originally wrote, it will always try to correct it the next time.

In this case, the “silent waiter” might really backfire, even if it’s a very good idea in general. One problem like this might be enough to frustrate your users though.