Bing vs Bard (Chatbot wars) (2023-08-14)

Using Clear Language to Avoid Confusion

A long time ago a software engineer advised me to try and ensure that I made my interfaces clear to users, especially those that are busy focusing on some other task the software enables. The phrase he used was to make a "Fisher-Price" interface, referring to the toy company that makes big and brightly colored buttons for their toys. The idea being that we didn't want to cram too many things on the screen or possibly confuse a user.

As a kid, I watched Mr. Roger's Neighborhood on television and enjoyed the show. Lots of kids had a similar view, but they might not have known that the main actor took care in choosing his words to convey concepts and ideas to children. In fact, the former producer said that the writers joked that his manner of speaking was its own language, called "Freddish."

I saw an article that talks about the care Fred Rogers took in explaining things, with examples of how he made choices in how to communicate with his audience. The piece got me thinking about not only Fisher-Price interfaces, but also the language that we use to communicate with developers when we ask them to build something.

Often I find in software development that we use a model or a shortcut to represent what we want. We partially describe something, or we assume that the words we choose mean the same thing to us and the other party. This goes both ways, with developers needing to be clear with their clients (and each other) and clients needing to be clear with developers.

I don't think I'd advocate for adopting Freddish, but I do think that we ought to pay attention to the words we choose, especially when we find the end result isn't quite what is expected. Examining where the design went wrong and if we could communicate differently, or more often, earlier in the process to avoid problems.

Communication is a difficult skill. I find constant examples at work, in my hobbies, even within my family where someone says one thing, but means another.

To me. To themselves, they feel perfectly clear. Context, innuendo, implication, we depend on these a lot in communications, but those can cause issues when we aren't very familiar with others. As we move to remote work, as we find less bonds with our co-workers because we don't see the same body language, as we don't eat meals together, as we don't often share a context of work, we need to be more careful about the words we use and find ways to ensure we all are saying the same thing that the other person hears.

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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