The Underscore Archives

I've been watching this thread with interest. As it happens, I use
Google Calendar, I like the idea of Quick Add, but I recognise that it
doesn't accept "any old sh!t". Many is the time that I've said (in
*my* natural language) 'til' instead of 'to' for a date or time range
and confused the poor old sap. What you end up with is an event on the
wrong date, or (when using 'at' to denote a venue) an event venue in
the event title. I guess it's a work in progress, and will undoubtedly
get better.

One of the primary jobs of a usability engineer is to disambiguate.
I'd always thought of this in terms of outputs (ie using language in
UIs that is difficult to misinterpret), but clearly this applies to
inputs as well. It's hard for a three-field date input to be
ambiguous; it's easy for a free-text date input to be such.

I think it boils down to the same difference as with GUIs vs CLIs.
With a CLI, you need to know what incantations to type (and once you
learn, it's a hell of a lot faster than a mouse-driven interface).
Until you get to that sweet spot of not having to look things up in a
man page, though, it can be very frustrating.

I therefore think this is less about *usability* than *learnability*.
Cars aren't easy to use at first, but once you've learned one, you can
drive any car, pretty much. Without the consistency in car UI, we'd
have to learn a new UI each time we got a new car. Consistency is
king, I reckon.

See the traintimes.org.uk site for a pretty nice example of date
inputs where you can put absolute or relative dates. Plus, they give
you examples, so you never wonder "what the hairy heck do I put in
there?"

See ya soon, peeps.

Tim