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Toy Story was fun. Toy Story 2 was poignant. Toy Story 3 is a subtle and beautiful existentialist masterpiece wrapped in brightly colored molded plastic. It doesn’t compute: The geniuses at Pixar are somehow able to wring more genuine human emotion from CGI renderings of rubber squeak toys than many studios can do with actual humans. Worth it for the incinerator scene alone: Simultaneously breathtaking and heartbreaking. You’ll know what I mean after you watch it, which you should do at your earliest convenience.
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My favorite blog on interaction design is Lukas Mathis’ ”Ignore the Code“. Interesting, thorough, probative, relevant, and [thesaurus sounds] fun.
Recently, he interviewed designer Jon Bell.
[Bell says:] Lately I’ve been doing a lot of contextual inquiry, which means going to a customer’s office (or home, or whatever you’re designing for) and getting a sense of what they do every day. I find it’s an exercise in studied ignorance as I try really hard not to bias the data with my own opinions.
“An exercise in studied ignorance” is a great turn of phrase; wish I’d thought of it. That’s an apt description of what I do when I talk to users as well, but also when I sit down to start designing. It requires holding two frames of mind simultaneously: One, the Architect, who holds in his head intimate and detailed knowledge of the product, tools, and processes, whose matrix embeds items like Fitt’s Law and gestalt psychology; and another, the Worker, who wants neither intimate or detailed knowledge of any such. He just wants the Blasted Thing to help him do whatever he wants to do.
I find that I end up doing a sort of Socratic dialog in my head. (Well, if my brain were more orderly, it would be like that.) The Architect asks, “What do you need to do?” and the Worker says something vague and tangential such as, “I have to teach a class next Thursday.” Then begins a long and winding conversation, in which the Architect teases out what the Worker wants, hopefully without the one tainting the other. (It is, after all, just me in there.)
Forget Socrates; it’s more like a re-enactment of Geri’s Game.
Most days I hope this little schizophrenic waltz doesn’t hurt my ability to think and communicate. Some days, I wonder.
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... repeatedly.
I recently bought a new computer from Dell. This is how Internet Explorer looked, out of the box:
Yes, there are that many toolbars. I have no idea what they all do. What’s a “Web Slice Gallery”? Couldn’t care less.
Yes, that website opens on 1024 x 768 with a horizontal scrollbar. Which is fine, because I don’t need to see the right edge of that page anyway. Nobody does.
But my favorite part is that they set my home page to MSN or Windows Live (or whatever they’re calling it this week), but took pains with an interruptive (!) modal (!) popup (!) to warn me that the site would be eating some of my lunch every day while it tortures kittens and emails porn to my grandmother. I think.
Bah. The only thing I use IE for anymore is downloading Chrome.
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This got me ruminating:
Typography and typeface design are essentially founded on a four-way dialogue between the desire for identity and originality within each brief (“I want mine to be different, better, more beautiful”), the constraints of the type-making and type-setting technology, the characteristics of the rendering process (printing or illuminating), and the responses to similar conditions given by countless designers already, from centuries ago to this day. — Gerry Leonidas in “A few things I’ve learned about typeface design” on the i love typography blog
Gerry thus defines four forces that act on the type designer:
- Axis 1: Self-Expression
- Axis 2: Technological Limits of the Tools
- Axis 3: Boundaries of the Medium
- Axis 4: The Tradition
I would collapse those two middle axes into one, and then apply the resulting three forces to every design problem (and other problems at large):
Axis 1: Self-ExpressionEach of us feels a need to forge a unique identity within the matrix of the society we find ourselves in — to “make a name for ourselves,” if you prefer less jargon. Designers do it by creating new and wonderful things. (At least we hope so.) But the act of creating something new is a devilishly difficult thing, both tedious and exacting. If you’re going to spend time doing it, there must be some personal reward.
Still, the best designers rein in their need to make their own personal stamp on the things they design. They use their creativity in the service of others: To make things other people will use/learn/love/enjoy. I concur with Andy Rutledge when he speaks about creativity in design here.
The question isn’t whether or not your design is going to bear your stamp. If you designed it, it will. The question is how loudly your design proclaims your name to the heavens. Sublime designs are those that say “this was made by someone” without the someone part distracting from the rest. For example, the iPad is clearly an Apple production, and yet
[it’s] not really about the hardware, at all – in fact, if these tools work as promised, the hardware disappears. The device will let users engage with information immediately, without having to negotiate a cumbersome interface. Indeed, the device itself vanishes and the user connects directly with the experience. That’s a powerful shift ... — Somebody named jacob
The success of Apple’s designs lies, in part, in their essential quietness.
Axis 2: Exigent RealityExigent Reality is ever-present, driving our need to accommodate ourselves to the world as it is (not as we would have it) and to adjust to the burden/joy of existence in a wonderful/absurd world. There is only so much you can do in typeface design, or computer software design. The good news is that progress inches us forward all the while. I thank my lucky stars that I can design computer software now without drawing flowcharts on paper. (I occasionally do, I just don’t have to.)
Would my designs be better if my tools were better? Probably. To some extent.
Axis 3: TraditionThe world existed on its own without you for (depending on your viewpoint) thousands, tens of thousands, millions, or billions of years. Each individual is born into a world that they didn’t (wouldn’t!) choose, into a human culture shaped by countless forerunners who did what they could to cope with Exigent Reality as they saw it at the time. As such, it is a lovely mess.
It is up to every designer to either “fit in” or “stand out” with respect to the past. Whenever we act, we are either extending the good deeds of heroes past, or righting the wrongs of villains. Windows, buttons, links, scroll bars. Every widget has its own history. Ignore it at your peril. For example, I concur with Lukas Mathis when he writes about custom scrollbars, here.
To paraphrase Goudy, the problem is not any more that the old-timers stole all the best ideas, but that the old ideas are in danger of being re-discovered from scratch. (Just look at the web designers rediscovering the basic principles of text typography and information design, as if these were newly-found disciplines.) — Gerry Leonidas, ibid
Anyway, it’s a great article. You should read it.
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Dear Editor,
I see that you changed “[this] may help you to see where each evangelist is coming from” to “[this] may help you to perceive where each writer is coming from”. The change from “evangelist” to “writer” makes good sense, but the change from “see” to “perceive” frightens and annoys me. “I see where you’re coming from” is a common English idiom, but if someone says, “I perceive where you’re coming from,” you should be instantly suspicious of what they’re up to. That’s just the sort of thing people say to distract from the fact that they don’t know what they’re talking about. Worse, “perceive” is a word that is weighed down by its (over)use in postmodern flimflam, mystic hipsterism and, let’s face it, sixties drug culture. In that sense it’s not a word I use, except pejoratively.
Most importantly, I just don’t like it. Chalk it up to irrational prejudice, but I just don’t like it.
Therefore I’d prefer to see the article read “see” there. If we are too close to press, so be it, but I hope you can see your way clear to change it back. If you’re still not convinced, go back and read this memo with “perceive” in place of “see” each time I use it. See what I mean?
Otherwise, stellar as usual.
Tongue planted firmly in cheek,
Cranky Writer
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... or at the very least, annoying.
“It has become increasingly difficult to avoid choices in our daily lives, to an extent which many of us find intrusive and counterproductive.” — Software developer Matt Legend Gemmel on “Engineer Thinking”
Plus one. This is true in every day life as well as software design. This is particularly bad when the choices presented are inscrutable or have unforeseeable consequences. What will happen if I “Automatically create drawing canvas when inserting AutoShapes”, as Word would have me decide? How can I tell the primary effect, much less any side-effects, if I can’t understand what the sentence means? I know what all the words mean, but put all together like that, I haven’t a clue.
The paralysis of choice is especially bad when I am required to wade through many options, most of which are bad alternatives for the one answer that would be best for me — for most people in most situations. Sadly, this is not often the default answer. My life is already filled with choices the consequences of which I do not fully understand, and which may come back to bite me later. Which college should my daughter attend? Minivan or SUV? Itemized or standard deductions?
When software bothers me to make choices that the experts who built the software should have made on my behalf, it only adds to the noise in my life. I do not know which port, protocol, profile, parameter, or pattern — and I don’t want to. My life is already filled with enough noise that I must sift through to find the music.
Software developers and designers:
- As Mr. Spock said, there are always possibilities. Nevertheless, that does not mean that I as a user should be bothered to know about all of them. The existence of a choice does not mean I should have to choose.
- You are the expert. You built the system, and you know how it should operate in most situations. If you don’t, you should figure that out, pronto. You’re just guessing (and I know how much you hate that).
- If there must be a setting, make the usual thing the default. Don’t include any dangerous, stupid, or useless options. I am not dangerous, stupid, or useless, but relative to you I am stunningly ignorant of the inner workings of your software. I appreciate that you built something wonderful; but I don’t want to understand it, I want to use it.
- Put the options in the order you want me to choose them, or in the order you think they are likely to make me happy. “Just put them in alphabetical order” is the sound of you admitting that you don’t know what you’re talking about (and I know how much you hate that). The alphabet is not an ordering principle, it is a randomizing one.
- My cat is stuck in a tree. I don’t need enough rope to hang myself with. What I need is a ladder.
- If you don’t know why I would need it, don’t build it. You won’t do a good job, and you should focus your time and energy on things that will bring you success, not disappointment. I’m just looking out for you, man.
- Memento mori. Remember that I have a finite amount of time on this earth, and I have a lot of really urgent things to do besides running your software. Every time you make me learn about something I don’t need to know, you rob me of moments I could spend with my children. (They grow up so fast!)
- And above all, remember that
[t]he Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS. The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table’s order, designing the house and organising the party. — Fraser Speirs, “Future Shock”
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For the last three years or so, I’ve been working on my employer’s flagship product, Logos Bible Software. It’s the 4.0 release of a mature product with a large, established customer base. The 3.0 version of the product has been out there for several years, and it works just fine, but it was built on an underlying technology1 that was better suited to 1999 than 2009. It’s starting to show its age.
(For those of you who don’t know, Logos Bible Software is a desktop application for reading, searching, annotating, analyzing, and generally playing around with Bibles and biblical reference works — dictionaries, lexicons, commentaries, maps, and so on. Think of it as Photoshop for pastors and seminarians: Required equipment for professionals, but very nice to have if you’re a hobbyist.)
So, we embarked on a ground-up rewrite of the software. Not only that, we attempted a ground-up redesign of the user interface. Sure, we re-used some of the code that shows a book on screen, some of the searching guts, some of the this and that and what-have-you. But the user interface, the part anyone ever sees, is as far as I know, completely new stuff.
I was the software designer for the project. I suppose all the cool kids are calling themselves “Interaction Designers” or “User Experience Experts” or some such. Well, if it looks good on your business cards, sure. But I prefer to be called a Software Designer, because that’s the simplest way to say what I actually do, which is to make pages like this:
Some typical pages from the Logos 4 specification. There are upwards of 1,000 such pages.
I like to think of it this way:
- If a software program is like a construction site, then I’m like the architect. I drew the plans. I didn’t build anything, and the core ideas weren’t mine. Still, I made a thousand tiny decisions every day, pondering such imponderables as: Link or button or link button? What happens when you click it? Where best to put it?
- The president of the company was like the owner/client. It’s really his baby, and he’s the one that wanted the thing built in the first place. He has ideas, let me tell you. Lots of ideas. My job as designer is to translate his ideas into workable designs. Sometimes that means telling him he’s brilliant. Other times, it means telling him he’s crazy. Sometimes it means doing what he wants anyway even though I think it’s crazy.
- The lead developers are like engineers. If an architect says, “We’re going to build a 10,000 square foot room with no support columns” the engineer is there to tell him that it can’t be done. Or that it can, but not with the budget we’ve been allocated. When it comes right down to it, the designs are just suggestions of what could be; once you get out to the job site and start sinking knee deep in the mud, your pretty blueprints may not count for much.
- The other devs are like the tradesmen and craftsmen who actually do the work. Like carpenters, plumbers, electricians, and painters, they are all highly skilled at making wonderful things. The Logos team is the best. Okay, I’m sure Google and Microsoft have great teams. But really, the Logos dev team is a highly motivated, highly intelligent, highly worthy group of men and women.
In going about my part of the job, I used three design principles that I shamelessly stole from the Shakers:
(1) Is it necessary? Not every great idea must come to fruition. This is all about prioritizing the design goals, and not getting carried away with the client’s exuberance. We were relentlessly minimal about the design of Logos 4; it’s fully featured, but it has just what it needs and no more. At every turn, we asked ourselves: What’s the simplest thing that could possibly work?
(2) Does it suit its purpose? This is really the hard one, because you have to know what goals a given feature or application is trying to accomplish, and then you have to figure out how to measure whether or not they were, in fact, accomplished. You can fail at either end: Identifying the right goals won’t help much if you build something that doesn’t accomplish them. Testing a product to death won’t help much if you’ve identified the wrong goals. “Yes, it does the wrong thing entirely, but it does it really well!”
(3) Can it be beautiful? I don’t actually do the final art on projects I work on, but I usually go the extra mile to make my wireframes and mockups look as close to final art as I can. Why? Because I find it’s not that much harder for me to do,2 and it gives everyone, from client to dev to art designer a better vision for what we’re trying to accomplish. I don’t make pixel-perfect artwork, like some do, but pretty close. In any event, I try to do my part on the aesthetics of the thing, because as we all know, pretty things work better.
If you can actually achieve those three goals, you hit that sweet spot in design called “elegance.” With Logos 4, I think we did. And good. (I may be biased, of course.)
Oh, and we made an iPhone version of the desktop software while we were at it.
—
1 DHTML and JavaScript, shudder.
2 I use Adobe InDesign to draw program screens; yes, it’s overkill, but I know how to bend it to my will.
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I don’t have much to say about this little trifle except: Watch it. It’s a little late to catch it in the theater, I understand, but if you see it come to your local discount theater or drive-in, or video store, go for it. It’s charming, lovely, surprising, warm, cheerful, witty, and endearing. In a word, winsome — as I suspect Julia Child was in real life. At least, this movie made me suspect so. That, and Meryl Streep simply inhabits the role of Julia Child.
Amy Whatsername was pretty good, too.
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No, this isn’t one of those apologies for not blogging more frequently. I never promised you people anything. However, I have been working on a couple of long term projects that have just come to fruition: One personal, one professional. I suppose I could write about those now that they aren’t top secret any more ...
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I watched District 9 Thursday night, and I’m still not sure what to think. Graphically violent and laced with profanity, it’s not alien invasion movie so much as a monster horror flick. By the time the film gets going, it’s just one shocking scene after another.
It seems to ask the question: What makes a person hideous? Or if you like, Who are the real monsters here?
- Are the alien “prawns”, with their chitinous shells, wriggling palps, shiftlessness and stupidity — are they hideous? They are certainly gross.
- Is Wikus van der Merwe, the mild-mannered and mildly stupid functionary who is charged with moving them out of their shantytown and into a concentration camp — is he hideous? He does some reprehensible things, but — well, I won’t spoil it for you.
- What about his employers, who are hellbent on learning how to use the aliens’ weapons technology, even if it means vivisecting a few sentient beings in the process — are they hideous? You tell me.
- What about the “Nigerian” gangsters who have exactly the same notion, only instead of using medical torture to get at the prawn secrets resort to sympathetic magic and cannibalism? (Well, prawn-ibalism, anyway.)
- And “Christopher Johnson,” the smartest (thus most noble, and most dangerous) prawn of them all — is he hideous? The film wants you to make the call.
That’s the question: Who’s more vile, disgusting, evil, stupid, self-serving, and (in a word) hideous than whom? You may find yourself surprised at how your opinion changes by the end. Speaking of which, the movie doesn’t give any pat conclusions, ending in much the same way as No Country for Old Men did: The world is filled with evil, evil is horrible, everyone is tainted, roll credits. Now you sort it all out. Courageous, that. The people I saw D9 with were excited by all the shooting and blowing things up, but as we were walking out of the theater, I overheard several expressing their disgust with the ending.
Several reviews I’ve read want to take the whole thing as an allegorical comment on South African apartheid. Those elements are certainly there, but that is reading the film too narrowly. It is a comment on human nature, as such: murderousness, greed, malice, gluttony, licentiousness, and a mad lusting after power. They’re all on display. Racism and bigotry are only one tiny sliver of the whole ball of guts we’re served up here.
Oh, and for goodness’ sakes, don’t take your kids to see this, unless you want them to see people and aliens exploding, medical experimentation without anesthesia, bodies ripped apart and gobbled down, and so on. The first half of the movie is merely gross; the last half, harrowing.
Was it a well-crafted film? Indeed it was. Special effects were amazing, and plot-serving. I never felt that it descended all the way into cliché or caricature, or that the pacing was off, or that the characterizations were not compelling. Did I find the film entertaining? That’s not the word I’d use, exactly. Did it make me think? Yes, yes it did.
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I’m sorry, but this is just cool:
Update: I finally got an iPhone, and I bought the app in question: Brushes. Here are a couple of my paintings. (Before you get too excited, the last two I did by painting over photographs.)
Fireboy Self-Portrait as a Mountain Man Bad Attitude
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My dad can’t spell for beans, but we love him anyway. Sometimes he chats me up for help. They’re like random little word puzzles that pop up from time to time.
This one stumped me for a minute:
Gary Evans: How do you spell Entridge
Pause while I google “entridge” ... no suggestion.
Eli Evans: Dunno. As in?
Gary Evans: a follow of people
Long pause. What? Longer pause. Oh!
Eli Evans: entourage
My dad is a lot smarter than that little chat transcript makes him sound. Like Thomas Edison, he can’t spell (or type) to save his life. Guess what, software designers and developers: You probably have a lot more users like my dad than you think.
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... may God have mercy on my soul.
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... is not a right, to be upheld by the state.
... is not a privilege, to be withheld by the state.
... is not a duty, to be observed by the citizen to the state.
... is a a set of goods and services, exchanged between free parties, subject to the laws of supply and demand (like any scarce commodity), best left to those who need the services and those who provide them to work out who gets what, when, and for how much.
Discuss.
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Jeff Atwood writes at Coding Horror: Nobody Hates Software More Than Software Developers. Key grafs:
One of the (many) unfortunate side effects of choosing a career in software development is that, over time, you learn to hate software. I mean really hate it. With a passion. Take the angriest user you’ve ever met, multiply that by a thousand, and you still haven’t come close to how we programmers feel about software. Nobody hates software more than software developers. Even now, writing about the stuff is making me physically angry.
Isn’t that an odd attitude coming from people whose job it is to write software? How can we hate what we get paid to create every day?
I can pipe in by saying that software designers hate software, too. There are a couple of reasons:
(1) Innovation requires contempt for the past. Good software designers and developers are constantly trying to improve the state of the art, and as such, we must focus on everything that is wrong with the art as it stands. And if you really want to move the ball, you must be willing to destroy not only the things that don’t work, but those that do. If I can imagine a better world where none of the toxic waste we now call software is allowed to go on polluting us all, then I can start to think about what kind of software would (should!) exist in that better world. If I start to think, “Like the current version, only better,” I’ve begun working on an incremental improvement, which means I’m no longer innovating. I’m tweaking.
(2) Reality is a harsh mistress. When you actually sit down to write (or design) a piece of software, you realize how hopelessly idealized that last paragraph really is. So, you want to make software that is so intuitive that even a baby can use it. So lightweight and standards-compliant it’ll run on 100 different brands and models of mobile device: phones, wristwatches, HUD sunglasses. So powerful that even sophisticated urban elites will believe it runs on pure sorcery. So obviously necessary that nobody could imagine the world without it. Like Google, for your grandma, on her pill organizer. Then, when you sit down to work, reality hits you in the face: You have to work within the APIs you’re given, with the same old libraries, the same clunky hardware. Most computers are still spinning huge hunks of magnetized metal around to read and write information! You want to put it all in the cloud? Be prepared to build some plumbing.
They say design is just adding constraints until only one solution is possible. When you design software, you realize very quickly that there are a lot of constraints you didn’t choose — wouldn’t choose. Not in a million years. Nobody is running the latest OS. Nobody has a big enough monitor to let your UI really breathe. Nobody has a fast enough hard drive or enough memory to let you do the insanely great calculations that you want to do on the fly. Unicode still doesn’t have some of the niggles and warts you need, and even if it did, the fonts wouldn’t have the right OpenType tables, and even if they did, the OS would just ignore them. Sigh.
You’re a developer: You wanted to build a monument that would last a thousand years. An algorithm so brilliant in its elegance that it becomes its own proof. What came out instead was a series of brittle hacks that will shatter the next time the user updates anything. Leveraging third party technologies? Shoot me now!
You’re a designer: You wanted your software to seem so perfect that it’s reading your user’s mind and doing what they wanted it to do before they even knew they wanted it done. What came out instead was a irritating jumble of settings, modes, and wizards that calls into question whether you can think coherently at all. Backwards compatibility? No, please, I’m begging you!
Like Jeff says, we work in the sausage factory. Trust me, you don’t want to know. Just enjoy your sausage (shudder).
Yeah, I hate software, too. Love to hate it, that is.
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Khoi Vinh of Subtraction.com writes about “last gasps for a dying medium” — large, paid funny pages.
Will these sorts of ploys work to save the newspaper? Probably not. My prediction: The newspaper is dead and will not be revived until electronic paper arrives in full force, which will be at least a decade yet, due to the usual supply-chain friction.
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Sauce. In a large pot, combine 1 pound dried blueberries, 1 pound fresh blueberries, 1 bottle of tawny port, 1/2 bottle cream sherry, 1/2 cup honey, 4 ounces of black currant jelly, 1 tablespoon blackstrap molasses, 1 tablespoon pomegranate molasses, 1/4 cup rose water, 10 threads saffron, 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract, a few drops of food-grade lemon essence oil, and a pinch of salt. Bring to a boil, then turn heat down to low. Simmer for 1-2 hours, or until reduced in half. Remove from heat, strain through a wire mesh strainer, and chill.
Cream. In a large mixing bowl, wisk together 16 ounces honey-flavored Greek yoghurt, 3 8-ounce bars of Neufchâtel cheese, 4 ounces (a small jar) lemon curd, and 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract until smooth. Chill.
Assembly. Add fresh blueberries to the chilled sauce. Stir through, coating the berries well. Pipe 1/2 teaspoon of cream into the bottom of an individual-serving phyllo shell. Spoon on two to three sauced berries per shell. Add one or two un-sauced berries on top for contrast. For the adventurous, add a wedge of sharp bleu cheese.
Happy eating!
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So I finally joined the legions of Apple fanboys (and girls) and bought an iPhone. And just to prove that I can, I’m writing this post on it. I wouldn’t want to write a novel this way, but I’m finding it amazingly easy to do. I imagine my one-finger typing speed is around 25 WPM or so. (I wonder if “there’s an app for that”?) The first night I had it, I spent several hours using Beejive, an IM client for the iPhone, again, just to see if I could. It worked beautifully, and my usual 80+ WPM was ramped down enough that I didn’t dominate the conversation the way I can sometimes do.
Update: There is an app for that. Several, in fact. I scored 20 WPM exactly.
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Mencius Moldbug (either that’s a pseudonym or that dude has some seriously cruel parents) doesn’t like the natural language query part of Wolfram Alpha. Go watch the fireworks, it’s fun!
Key grafs:
Like most hubristic UIs, Wolfram Alpha is operating with a completely fictitious user narrative. The raison d’etre of the natural-language interface, stated baldly, is to create a usable tool for stupid people who might be confused or intimidated by a tree of menus. The market of stupid people is indeed enormous. The market of stupid people who like to use data-visualization tools is, well, not. (And since the interface is not in fact easy but actually quite difficult, it achieves the coveted status of a non-solution to a non-problem.)
...
Strangely, to the developers of intelligent control interfaces, these interfaces appear to work perfectly well. Moreover, when the developers demo these interfaces, the demo comes off without a hitch - and is often quite impressive. This is not the normal result of broken software. This “demo illusion” convinces the developers that the product is ready to ship, although it is not and will never be ready to ship.
— The aforementioned Mr. Moldbug
And a particularly insightful comment:
[Wolfram Alpha] is meant to be used for combining the information in the database in any way you want, to create new information. It is hence not an information search-engine, it is a big calculator that happens to have a lot of constants defined. If I want to find information about Isaac Newton, WA is not the right place to be. If I want to multiply the number of years Newton lived with the current velocity of the IIS, WA is the place to be. Catch my drift? It is not meant for you to find the information you want, it is made so you can make new information via correlation and creative combining of objective information.
But as I said, the whole natural language thing is silly, and will almost certainly never work. They need a syntax, one that is close to natural language, but makes the job for the interpreter much easier. Then you can actually learn the syntax instead of just guessing all the time.
— Ole - André Johansen
Myself, I have never cared for natural language systems. If an NLP system is just performing a search query, then throwing any old bag of keywords at it usually works just as well. If it’s doing anything more complicated than that, it’s like trying to explain where babies come from to a four year old. You get a lot of “I don’t understand” and you’re constantly having to try and figure out: How can I explain this in a way that he’ll understand? But won’t be too upsetting to him? But won’t give him the wrong idea.
Like I say, that’s not making my life easier.
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