Interaction Design Theory: Natural description and natural tasks

This time we have some very small things, rather small. But first tell a story:

This evening, you plan to go out to the next restaurant, to move, to find a new shop to sit down, the waiter very attentive to come over and ask you want to eat something.
You ask, "Do you have anything good to eat?" ”
A: We have soybean and edible Colony Group Brewing agent and Carassius auratus common high-temperature heating products; soybean protein by magnesium chloride, calcium sulfate, chloride and sodium chloride in the role of solidification and Carassius auratus common long time heating products Alone Carassius auratus to heat the finished products at high temperature in the steam environment. ”
You were embarrassed, as if you were not in the world. Then the next table of the CDC buddies tell you, in fact, braised crucian carp, crucian carp tofu soup and steamed crucian carp.
You say: "Well, I want to try." ”。
Then the waiter went down, and a moment later, the waiter came back and said, "Sir, the big deal is bad!" Chef No. 1th treats vinegar as a soy sauce! The 2nd chef in to the carp to open the fish when the gall pierced, fish become bitter can't eat! No. 3rd chef's Pressure cooker exploded, Crucian carp unaccounted for! In addition, our food material distribution staff just met a car accident is now in hospital rescue! ”
You start thinking about what's behind this set of cups, and the CDC buddies tell you, "Give It up, fish is gone." ”
You are ready to go, but the waiter called you: "Sir, please Shang a fee of 100 yuan." ”
You are angry and melancholy asked: "This did not tell me in advance?" ”
The waiter was very calm: "There is a line of exquisite gray fine print on the package of cutlery. ”
You want to find evidence, but the packaging of cutlery has already been thrown away.
So you just smiled and asked the waiter, "Do you want to know how hard my right hand is?" ”
　　

This is a story about natural description and natural tasks, and it looks like a three-stream novel used to cheat royalties.
Like the plot to order in the story, most of our users live without a technical dictionary. Therefore, the use of natural descriptions that conform to user habits and scenarios is an inevitable requirement for barrier-free design.

This is already a widely known principle, it exists from what I don't know about interactive design, and we all understand that it's not recommended to use jargon or generic idioms for users in general, like jumping out of a dialog box full of code when memory overflows, For example, when filling out a form to warn the user that "this field already exists in the database" is also very depressing, designers have done a good job, and more people in the jargon have been able to actively use natural descriptions in their development and communication. (Please forgive me for saying that, but it didn't happen a while ago, and it's depressing for the interaction designers.) This is not much to say.
Beyond this, in some cases natural description is not perfect for certain scenarios and tasks, natural description is generally worded principles and techniques, for task scenarios and process optimization principles I call it "natural task":

Here are two examples to toss:

　　Case 1. The download task encountered a problem.

When users start to download a task, they will encounter several special problems, technical point of view, when the user submitted the download request to the server, feedback from the server to the user of the following:

Initially, in the case of natural description, the client will display the following tips:

It is basically natural to look at basic such feedback from the perspective of expression, but according to the specific scene, the first two kinds of feedback in the client performance is the download progress stopped, the need for users to wait, and the user can only wait, and then two feedback in the client performance is download failure, require users to restart the task or cancel the task, There is nothing else to do because the event occurs on the server side. In this case, if these hints are not considered, the user actually appears to be experiencing just the same problem.
If the user can see and do the same, and although the cause of the event is different but the results are basically similar, then why give him so many feedback? So we merge the feedback of performance and processing into a more sketchy scenario:

As a result, the problem seems to be getting less and the world is clean. For normal users, in fact, do not need to pipe after what happened to the chef, as long as the fish did not have enough to make the next decision, because this is expected to occur in one of the accidents.
In this case, the original feedback is a natural description, there is no fault, there is no problem, but the fact that they are some superfluous, and even may be good at doing bad things, say too much is easy to let the user imagination, generate additional expectations, causing unnecessary insecurity and unnecessary thinking. Multiple performance and processing consistent feedback is presented in the same, commonly expected, way to reduce the types of events encountered by users and reduce the burden of thinking. "Say more than wrong", although this sentence is more gray, but this example is indeed some of these taste. The natural task principle is to further control the user's expectations by taking the feedback that is already a natural statement to avoid complications.

　　case 2. Close a hint bubble.

There is a hint bubble containing the operation, because its importance can not use the way of automatic disappearance, we need to provide a "close button", and because of the task characteristics, it is closed after it can not appear again. We now have three candidates: the text connection "Close", the text connection "no longer prompts", and the icon "X" that is closed.
These three candidates are as natural as nature, seemingly with which one does not matter, but we struggled for a long time after the choice of the most verbose scheme-text connection "no longer prompt."

Let's take a look at the ideal small task process:

Among them, we want users to read the bubbles in the hint, we also hope that the user will not appear after the bubble is expected. So back to look at three candidates, "close" the text and icon is really too natural, the use of this world is everywhere, a careless will step on an example, the natural to the user may conveniently click down, so he will miss our two hope, so in the future will encounter more trouble. If you use text that is no longer prompt, the user will pause for a special "no longer" two words, and this simple and less burdensome pause is enough for him to realize the importance of the hint, and he will have a very high probability of fulfilling our two hopes, We will also be satisfied with the more natural description to achieve our unnatural purposes.
Just like the last accident at dinner, the user is apt to miss something in a natural environment, and we should, at the appropriate time, make it natural for the user to generate the expected and naturally generated tasks by the appropriate natural description. Compulsion is always unpleasant, and it is also an advanced treatment using natural description. It seems to be a digression, but it is necessary to be in a certain situation, naturally, to be born.
This example and the dead cat in the "Multi-button coexistence" mentioned in the example of the link to the button to understand together.

The above two examples are the natural tasks carried out on the basis of natural description, as mentioned earlier, the application of natural description is based on semantics and scenario, and the application of natural tasks is based on scenes and tasks, and natural descriptions are naturally, easily understood and expected for specific scenarios and tasks. The development of task scenarios can often be well controlled and guided.
The principle of nature, after the completion of the natural description is still further happening, this is indeed a very small thing, from this little thing to look, small extrapolate, many interactive skills are actually this principle, in the final analysis is the Tao nature.