Figures for Cognitive Dimensions talk

Figure 1: An impoverished discussion
Figure 2: An improved discussion
Figure 3: List of Cognitive Dimensions
Figure 4: Some Trade-Off Relationships

Figure 1: An impoverished discussion

This example illustrates a discussion that would have been better if the discussants had shared appropriate concepts

Verbatim transcript from a newsgroup discussion (real words from real users). A's remark that starts the excerpt was the conclusion of an irritated message about how much work he or she had had to do to jeep identical formats for all components of a large project (a 'book' on Framemaker jargon).

NB: this discussion referred to a version of Framemaker that is now obsolete.

A: ALL files in the book should be identical in everything except body pages. Master pages, paragraph formats, reference pages, should be the same.

B: Framemaker does provide this ... File -> Use Formats allows you to copy all or some formatting categories to all or some files in the book.

A: Grrrrrrrrr ........ Oh People Of Little Imagination !!!!!!

Sure I can do this ... manually, every time I change a reference page, master page, or paragraph format .....

What I was talking about was some mechanism that automatically detected when I had made such a change. ( ..... ) Or better yet, putting all of these pages in a central database for the entire book ......

C: There is an argument against basing one paragraph style on another, a method several systems use. A change in a parent style may cause unexpected problems among the children. I have had some unpleasant surprises of this sort in Microsoft Word.

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Figure 2: An improved discussion

A: Framemaker is too viscous.

B: With respect to what task?

A: With respect to updating components of a book. It needs to have a higher abstraction level, such as a style tree.

C: Watch out for the hidden dependencies of a style tree.

(further possible comments)

The abstraction level will be difficult to master; getting the styles right may impose lookahead.

In this version of the discussion, a number of new terms have been introduced:

viscosity
abstraction level
hidden dependencies
imposed lookahead

The terms are part of the framework of cognitive dimensions presented in this document.

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Figure 3: The Full List of Cognitive Dimensions

This page uses a table. It will be hard to read unless your browser supports tables.

dimension	thumbnail description
Viscosity	resistance to change
Hidden Dependencies	important links between entities are not visible
Visibility and Juxtaposibility	ability to view components easily
Imposed Lookahead	Constraints on order of doing things
Secondary Notation	extra information in means other than program syntax
Closeness of Mapping	representation maps to domain
Progressive Evaluation	ability to check while incomplete
Hard Mental Operations	operations that tax working memory
Diffuseness/Terseness	succinctness of language
Abstraction Gradient	amount of abstraction required, amount possible
Role-expressiveness	purpose of a component is readily inferred
Error-proneness	syntax provokes slips
Perceptual mapping	important meanings conveyed by position, size, colour etc
Consistency	Similar semantics expressed in similar syntax

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Figure 4: Some Trade-Offs among Cognitive Dimensions

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