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On the Aesthetics of Outliners, Pims, and Personal Knowledge Applications
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Posted by Chris Thompson
Oct 22, 2009 at 10:17 PM
Lots of great comments in this thread. I think it’s important to distinguish usability from aesthetics, though the latter may have some influence on the former. DOS applications like GrandView had a Zen-like aesthetic quality: sparse, few distractions, rectangles as the dominant visual feature, appealing color schemes. Some were more usable than others (why “quit” was assigned to F7 in WordPerfect never made any sense to me).
I don’t think there’s anything aesthetically wrong with ConnectedText at all. Grey, boxy uniform toolbars are far less distracting to me than Office 2007-style ribbons with icons of varying sizes, positions, orientations, and alignments. Where CT seems weak to me is actual editing usability. Having to work in code ends up taking longer than WYSIWYG editing, though one’s initial impulse is the opposite. I spent some time earlier in the year writing some documents in LaTeX, thinking I’d be more productive, but the opposite turned out to be true. It takes the mind more time to cognitively process codes than WYSIWYG text. Some of CT’s wiki competitors have direct text editing now (TWiki, etc.), so I’m surprised CT doesn’t offer it as an option.
I’d definitely agree that color and other visual distractions can affect usability. Sometimes I switch my monitor to greyscale (using the built in OS X facility for this or a program called Nocturne) and it is surprising how a lack of color cues helps the mind to focus… much more than one would expect. I imagine part of the appeal of full screen modes and retro text apps is the lack of visual distractions to disrupt the subconscious.
—Chris
Posted by shatteredmindofbob
Oct 23, 2009 at 02:27 AM
I think between Mac OSX, Vista/Win 7 and Office 2007, our expectations of how something should look have dramatically increased in the last few years, so a lot of folks like all their apps to look pretty.
Problem is, most of the cool stuff we like on this forum is made by independent developers who can’t afford the multi-million dollar usability studies done by Microsoft and Apple.
Posted by shatteredmindofbob
Oct 23, 2009 at 04:23 AM
Should add, much as I like to think I’m not swayed by a pretty package, I have to admit, I downloaded Xmind recent to try it and took me five minutes to decide to uninstall Freemind.
Posted by Manfred
Oct 24, 2009 at 06:42 PM
Lucas said: I would say that CT has a well-developed ?functional aesthetic.?
That’s very well put. I couldn’t agree more. I think that Brainstorm has this kind of asethetics as well.
I also tried Tex, and I had the same experience, as Chris Thompson: too much cognitive overhead. But I don’t find the same for ConnectedText. This may have to do with the fact that I don’t use many formatting features. Italics, bold, lists, and headings, and those formats are not easy to remember but also easy to apply, CTRL-I, CTRL, etc.
Manfred
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Oct 26, 2009 at 07:07 PM
Chris Thompson wrote:
>I’d definitely agree that color and other visual
>distractions can affect usability. Sometimes I switch my monitor to greyscale
>(using the built in OS X facility for this or a program called Nocturne) and it is
>surprising how a lack of color cues helps the mind to focus… much more than one would
>expect. I imagine part of the appeal of full screen modes and retro text apps is the lack
>of visual distractions to disrupt the subconscious.
I couldn’t agree more.
By far the best screen for writing I have ever used was an orange Hercules (720?348) monitor in DOS days. My eyes never got tired and I spent innumerable hours looking at it. Many years later I learnt that the orange wavelength used by that monitor was the one the human eye is most sensitive to; therefore the brightness required for viewing was very low compared to any other colour. That, in addition to the clean interface provided by the appas available those days (compare Lotus 123 for DOS to Excel for Windows), was for me paradise.
Ever since I have tried to recreate a similar writing environment. Brainstorm is the closest I have got to that, with the added bonus of its text structuring functionalities.