O

Object

Objects are high level programming concepts that combine data and procedures (methods).  Objects are defined as classes, generalized clusters of attributes and behaviors; a specific object is an instance (or instantiation) of the class patterns, with its own variation. For example, if an object FLOWER has the attribute COLOR with several possible values, a single instance of the class might be a YELLOW FLOWER or a RED FLOWER.

 Object Oriented Programming (OOP)

A programming structure and set of practices that is afforded by a number of languages, beginning with Alan Kay’s SmallTalk (1974) and most commonly associated with C++ and Java.  OOP is characterized by an abstraction hierarchy in which elements of the system, called objects, are specified as members of classes with shared characteristics.  Objects combine data structures and related processes or methods.  The methods are often written as event-handlers, to be triggered by an interaction initiated by a human interactor, another object, or another computational process.

Ontology

In philosophy, a definition and specification of the essence of an entity, as in the statement that God is Love, or matter is composed of irreducible atoms.  In computer programming, an ontology is an explicit formal specification of the objects, concepts and other entities that are assumed to exist in some area of interest and the relationships that hold among them, as in an ontology of human diseases and treatments.

 Orature

A body of composed works in oral form, parallel to the term “literature” for written works, and coined to recognize the many cultural forms that arise from societies without writing technology or that are sustained independent of traditions of writing.  Also called “oral literature.”

 Output

The data that is produced by a computer program and passed on to other processes and sometimes to the interactor. See also Input.

P

 Parameter

A variable whose value changes the way a programming function is calculated or an object is instantiated. For example, a program function may be written as GetPrice (item, color, quantity). A program may call this function by specifying the parameters like this: GetPrice(blouse, red, 3) causing the program to return the price of three red blouses.  The variables that specify the attributes of instances of a class are also parameters, as when we instantiate the class defined as flower(color) with the statement new flower(red).

 Participatory Affordance

With the encyclopedic, procedural, and spatial properties, one of the four defining representational affordances of the digital medium.  The digital medium is participatory in allowing an interactor to manipulate, contribute to, and have an effect upon digital content and computer processing.  Participation combined with procedurality create interactivity, which means that the designer must script the behavior of the computer and the behavior of the interactor. When participation has been well-shaped the interface becomes transparent. Transparent participation combined with visible procedurality creates the experience of agency for the interactor, a key design goal for any digital artifact. The participatory affordance can support but should not be confused with social participation in online communities and the participatory design practices that foster extensive user involvement in the development process.

 Pattern

A recognizable configuration especially those that can be perceived and recognized by sight or sound. Cognitive patterns, called schema, provide frames for assimilating new experiences to known configurations. Media conventions are patterns that fit together into formats and genres, allowing us to convey the meaning of a novel communication by shaping it into a familiar configuration.

 Personal Digital Assistant (PDA)

A handheld digital device that includes a calendar and address book, such as the Apple Newton or the Palm Pilot. The PDA was a popular category of consumer device in the 1990’s whose functions were absorbed and expanded by digital cell phones (popularized as “smartphones”) in the early 2000’s.

Pervasive Games

Games that take place in real world locations or that use informational computer technologies like email or social networks for gaming purposes while blurring the boundary between the everyday world and the game. See also Alternate Reality Games.

Place

A memorable, differentiated area within a navigable space. Designing navigable digital environments requires the creation of distinct places through consistent labels, visual cues, and especially through association with memorable events. See also Active Creation of Belief, Immersion, Spatial Affordance.

 Platform

Fixed configuration of inscription materials and transmission codes, of hardware and software, that forms a foundation for multiple media artifacts.  Examples of stable digital platforms: an operating system like MS DOS, Windows, Mac OS X; a game console like Nintendo Wii, Microsoft X Box, Sony Playstation; a browser like Explorer, Firefox, Chrome; a DVD format like Blu Ray. Platforms have affordances and constraints. The existence of a stable platform encourages the growth of standardized formats linked to conventions of representation leading to the development of genres. For example, the popularity  and stability of the iPhone platform has led to the development of several genres of phone applications, in the common format of an  iPhone “app.”  Once developed, genres can become independent of their incubating platform though they may still retain features that reflect the affordances and constraints of the originating environment.

 Predictive Text

Completion that pops up automatically in response to partially entered text. Predictive text relieves the burden of repetitive typing on awkward mobile devices and provides search engines with the ability to steer queries to known areas. Interactors are usually given a choice of accepting or rejecting the completion text which may appear in line as if typed by the interactor or in a separate line for confirmation.

Primitives

The smallest units in a processing system, with which the more complex units can be built.  The 00’s and 11’s of machine code are the lowest level primitives of programming languages.  The representations of alphanumeric characters and other data types sit on top of these representational primitives, as do the operations of the computer.  On top of these patterns of 00’s and 11’s are built the higher level primitives of assembler language such as ADD and GOTO   Structured languages have more complex primitives such as IF THEN and CASE statements, and are translated by special programs called compilers into the primitives of machine code that allows the computer to execute them.  It is a principle of good programming to establish primitives and build complexity from efficiently designed simpler elements. Similarly, designers can think of participatory actions, like pointing and clicking, as primitives of interaction, and interface elements like menus and buttons as primitives of visual interaction design.

 Procedures

In programming, procedures are sets of instructions that the machine will execute. Functions and methods are procedures, and the word is sometimes used to distinguish the instruction part of a software environment from the data.

Procedural Affordance

The most important of the four affordances of the digital medium, the processing power of the computer that allows us to specify conditional, executable instructions. The procedural affordance has created a new  representational strategy,  as powerful as spoken language or recorded moving images: the simulation of real and hypothetical worlds as complex systems of parameterized objects and behaviors. When procedurality is well designed the actions of the computer have visibility, and the parameters in the control of the interactor.  Procedurality and participation are the affordances that create interactivity and visible procedurality combined with transparent participation creates the experience of agency for the interactor, a key design goal for any digital artifact. Not to be confused with the use of the word “procedural” to describe the more linear programming strategies that predate object oriented programming. See also interactivity,  agency, and the participatory, spatial, and encyclopedic affordances.

Progress Indicator

A convention for providing feedback to interactors on an otherwise invisible automated process, like downloading a file, that requires waiting. For example the familiar progress bar represents the task as a line moving left to right filling up a space in proportion the degree of completion. Progress indicators often have explicit calculations of time left to wait, and are associated with a cancel button allowing the interactor to quit out of a too slow process.

Protocol

A formal standard specification for exchanging communication in systems of people, machines, or both combined. Diplomatic protocol is a code of conduct that specifies how ambassadors and heads of state are greeted and seated at international functions in order to ensure that no one will be confused, misunderstood, or offended. Internet Protocol (IP) is a suite of standard formats and processes for transferring information across machines and transmission technologies.

 Prototype

A crucial element in the design process, a simplified version of the final system, which communicates to potential users, developers, funders, and other stakeholders the key functionality and design elements. Rapid prototyping allows design teams to share ideas and to critique approaches to a design problem based on hands-on interaction.  See also Iterative Design Process, Mockup, Storyboard

Prototype Theory

A strategy of classification for ambiguous sets of artifacts, established experimentally by Eleanor Rosch, based on identifying representative exemplars and shared attributes, such as “chair “and “sofa” as exemplars of the category “furniture” (Rosch 1975). A cognitive model that can be employed as a alternative design strategy to (or a way of eliciting the necessary distinctions for) fixed definitions and hierarchical taxonomies.

Pseudocode

Imitates computer code without attention to rigid syntax and without abbreviations that may be mysterious to human. Pseudocode is human-readable, step by step logic of a computer algorithm expressed in a syntax that is similar to programming syntax but is meant to be read by humans rather than machines

Q
R

Radio Button

An interface convention defined in the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines, as one of a set of buttons in which only one can be chosen at any time.  Radio buttons are round, and the chosen one is marked by a dot in the middle. Radio buttons are differentiated from sets of check boxes, which are square, and which afford multiple simultaneous marked (checked) choices.

 Recoding

A concept in cognitive science referring to the reconceptualizing of information in order to make it more memorable, especially the chunking of smaller items into larger conceptual units, such as the breaking down of a long string of numbers into multiple smaller units.

Record

An entry in a database representing a single item, made up of discrete fields.

 Reframing

An important part of the design process that involves reassessing the original context in which a design problem is presented in order to substitute a different viewpoint or widen or otherwise refine the context. See also Frame

Refining

An important part of the process of creating new media genres is the refining of existing media conventions. For example, as part of the process of re-inventing television news, designers refined the headline scroll so that it moves vertically instead of horizontally, assuring that viewers always see a complete headline.

Remediation

The phenomenon of reproducing the conventions and/or content of one medium in another medium.  Also the theory, advanced by Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, that “new media” always reconfigure older media, and in particular that digital forms both borrow from and seek to suppress earlier forms. (Bolter and Grusin 1999).

Representation

The process or effect of creating meaning by connecting signs (e.g. the set of vocalizations pronounced “tree”, the written word “tree,” a sketch of a trunk and branches) with referents in the world  (a particular tree) or abstract concepts (the general category of “tree”).  Representation is supported by socially constructed codes, and meaning is created within specific cultural communities of interpretation, such as French courtiers of the 17^th century or contemporary American urban teenagers.

Representational codes are sometimes distinguished sometimes from presentational codes  which involve immediate bodily presence (e.g. gestures, clothing) rather than mediated communication such as writing.  In acting, “representation” refers to a detached style rejected by 20^th century theorist/teachers like Stanislavsky and Strasberg in favor of “embodying” the character. See also Medium, Semiotics.

Resource Allocation

A kind of game mechanic in which a player is given a limited quantity of some resource (money, weapons, land, avatar-building skill points) to distribute among a range of desirable choices. Resource allocation games (e.g. Civilization, Sim City, The Sims) force players to think strategically.  The mechanic is applicable not just to games but to simulations in general, and to the avatar building phase of games in many genres.

Respawning

The generation of a new instance of an object or character in a simulated world or game.  The Pac-Man ghosts respawn after dying, as does Pac-Man himself until he has used up all his lives. Usually respawning happens at a designated place in a game world, often setting the player back to an earlier stage.

Rituals

Standardized patterns of interaction that are performed in a predictable, prescribed, or spontaneously elaborated but consistently repeated manner among members of a culture. Rituals may be written down and repeated verbatim (as in religious and legal ceremonies) or they may provide a general framework for interaction (like greeting guests at an informal party). Rituals often assign different roles to the participants, such as the bride, groom, minister, ring-bearer, etc. at wedding. Familiar rituals organize social life for large scale events (like elections) and repeated events (like leave-taking). Interaction design can be thought of as the creation of appropriate rituals for coordinating human-computer interactions and human-human interactions mediated by computer.

Robustness

A desirable quality in computer systems, indicating reliability and flexibility, especially the ability to recover from error-inducing conditions such as poorly formed input or other conditions that the developers could not explicitly foresee. Modularity supports robustness by allowing programmers to isolate elements that can lead to program failure, such as hardware-specific drivers that will need to be updated separately from the rest of the system.  See also Modularity, Scalability.

S

Sandbox

An area in a complex computer system or game where interactors can practice with the tools and commands at their disposal without consequences in the main system. Also used to describe games or environments that allow the player to construct their own virtual objects such as Spore Galaxies or Second Life.

Save Point

A place or level in a game at which the player is allowed to save the current state to be returned to on replay if they reach a losing state – usually the player’s character dying or failing irreversibly at a task – before reaching the end of the end. Some save points, like the start of a new level, are automatic, and some require the player to issue an explicit game saving command. Platform games like Super Mario will automatically respawn a new instance of a character at save points.

Scalability

A desirable quality in computer systems, indicating an ability to accommodate more users, larger data sets, and other increases in the scale of processing without crashing or having to be re-engineered. Scalability is also a useful concept for human systems, which often work at the small scale level, like the accounting system in a family-run pizza parlor, but do not “scale” appropriately to accommodate a larger enterprise, like a chain of pizza parlors. See also Robustness.

 Scenario

A story-like abstraction of a dramatic situation that focuses key elements of a design problem, as in a use case, or of a replayable simulated process, as in a military training system. See also Storyboard.

Schema

An organized, abstract representation of knowledge, pluralized as schemas or schemata. The term can be used to refer to mental constructs (cognitive schemas representing, for example, our general concept of a house, a newspaper, or the grammatical structures of a language), classification schema (like Dewey Decimal system), or computational objects (e.g. XML schemas for standardized documents, components of computational knowledge representations). See also Frame, Pattern, Taxonomy.

 Segmentation

Dividing of information into its constituent units.  Segmentation is one of the key tasks of information design.  The granularity with which information is segmented is always an important design decision, with the goal of creating semantic units that provide both precision of reference and preserves the context of the larger unit. Legacy segmentation conventions often reflect the constraints of pre-digital materials, such as the paper page or the vinyl record album.

Semantic unit

A unit of information in which a single physical form is associated with a logical division in meaning.  A paragraph is a semantic unit, but a page is a physical segment that may or may not correspond to a meaningful content division.  Other examples of semantic units are: a spoken or written word, a sentence, a chapter, a database field or table, a shot in a movie, a single photograph, a sequence of shots or photographs detailing a unified action. Semantic units may overlap one another or be nested one inside the other. In representing information in digital form it is important to segment it into semantic units of multiple levels of granularity for indexing and display.

 Semantic web

A goal articulated by Tim Berners-Lee and pursued by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for integrating vast distributed knowledge resources through common information structures such as permanent addresses and XML document schemas (Berners-Lee, Hendler et al. 2001; Berners-Lee, Shadbolt et al. 2006).

 Semiotics

The study of signs, such as language, gestures, and written or graphical texts for the purpose of understanding what they mean and how that meaning is constructed within specific cultural contexts. Important theorists of semiotics include Ferdinand de Saussure, A.J. Greimas, Roland Barthes, and Umberto Eco.

Sensemaking

The cognitive process of constructing a mental model of a confusing or complex entity or experience, as well as the social, cultural, and institutional processes and the information design strategies that support the collective creation of such models.

 Shared Attention

The basis of all communication. Media conventions and genres create shared attention by establishing common formats, expectations, and semantic associations. To invent a new medium is to expand the human capacity for shared attention, to increase the complexity of our reasoning about the world and to deepen our capacity for mutual understanding. See also Joint Attentional Scene.

Simulation

A system with behaviors, implemented as a human-performed game or a computer program or a combination of the two, that abstracts and imitates key components of an imaginary or real system, usually composed of multiple actors and complex causal relationships.  Simulations are usually run multiple times to assess the effect of changing parameters.

Sign

A Sign is a conventionalized physical form (signifier) that is recognized as referring  to something other than itself (the signified) within a specific discourse community.  A sign can be a symbol (like letters), an icon (like the stick figures differentiating male and female public toilets), or an index (like smoke is for fire).

Signal

A form of patterned data, perceivable by machine or human, that is inscribed and transmitted in a medium,  such as audio transmitted as a radio wave or  letters transmitted by telegraph. In information theory, signals are corrupted by noise.

 Situated Action Theory

A framework for understand human-machine interactions as conversations in which both parties are constantly assessing the state of the other. In the Situated Action model, the user’s knowledge of a process is not identical with a single step-wise decision tree or Plan, but inextricably tied to a much less predictable sequence of embodied actions. It is therefore the designer’s job to enhance communication, anticipating the user’s state, making the machine’s assumptions visible, and giving the user control over the sequence rather than expecting her behavior to conform to invariant scripts (Suchman 1987). See also Distributed Cognition.

 

Skeuomorphic **

Used pejoratively in digital design contexts to refer to icons and other visual interface elements that  reproduce the physical features of legacy artifacts without enhancing functionality. The bookcase-shaped “newstand” in the iOS interface is a well-known example. Inappropriate reproduction of legacy attributes are often a sign of early remediation-based design approaches.

 Spatial Affordance

With the encyclopedic, participatory, and procedural properties, one of the four defining representational affordances of the digital medium. Digital environments can represent space using all the strategies of traditional media, such as maps, images, video tracking, and three-dimensional models. Unlike older media, however, and similarly to the experiential world and the designed spaces of landscapers, urban planners, and architects, digital media artifacts can be navigated. This affordance is not a function of visual representation, since it can be produced in text adventure games like Zork and Adventure, which created navigable spaces without any images.  It is by-product of the procedural and participatory affordances, of setting up rules of interaction that have the consistency of navigating a fixed landscape, and of the innate human propensity to make sense of the world through spatial metaphors: we are predisposed to spatialized our experience, turning the appearance of text on our screen into the experience of “visiting’ web sites.  Navigable space is created by clearly distinguishing one place from another and creating consistent interaction patterns that support movement between spaces. When encyclopedically large and detailed informational spaces or virtual worlds are well organized with clear boundaries, consistent navigation, and encyclopedic detailsthat reward exploration they create the experience of immersion.

State

In computer-based environments, the state of a system at any moment is the set of current values of all the system variables. The concept of state is useful to the designer in understanding the range of possibilities for elements of a system (such as characters within a virtual world, documents within an archive) as well as for the system as a whole.

 Storyboard

A design tool consisting of a sequence of single images, like a comic strip, illustrating a temporal sequence, used in the pre-production phase of a film, animation, or interactive digital artifact. Storyboards are used as a strategy for thinking through design, and can be used early in the process, in conjunction with mockups to illustrate the interaction, or to illustrate a written use case. See also Iterative Design, Scenario, Wireframes.

Structured Document

A document, like an HTML page or a podcast, composed of discrete parts labeled with metadata tags, which provide semantic segmentation similar to the fields in a database record.  A large repository of similarly structured media files is a structured archive. See also Semantic Web. 

Substitution System

A way of generating variation within a fixed template, by identifying slots that can be filled by any one of a set of similar elements. Language is a grammatical substitution system, allowing us to substitute any noun or noun phrase as the subject of a sentence. Style sheets for web pages are substitution systems, establishing a fixed pattern for the display of variable content. Game avatars are constructed with substitution systems that allow players to interchange hair styles, facial features, body shapes, and clothing, creating elaborate variation within a fixed, easily extended framework. Substitution systems can be used as an information design and presentation strategy to establish genres that focus shared attention, and as a software design strategy to reduce the complexity of the programming task while expanding the interactor’s range of choice and experience of variety.

 Subroutine

In computer systems structured with a single central control program subroutines are subordinate programs that are passed information to do specific tasks and then return information and control to the master program. Creating subroutines is an example of modularity in programming. See also Function.

 Summative Evaluation

Testing and data collection conducted after completion of a project to assess its performance. See also Formative Evaluation.

T

 

 Table

One of the basic building blocks of information design, an extension of the list through spatialization and the basis for database design. See also Field, Grid, Record.

Tacit Knowledge

Unconscious, unarticulated, situation-specific, knowledge that has been learned from experience through not explicitly. Tacit knowledge often forms a part of expert or veteran “know how,” and it can be hard to capture by novices or design interviews, since the knowledgeable person is not aware of drawing upon it.

 Tag

A descriptor used as metadata and attached to the whole or a part of a media object, such as a photograph or a heading in a web page as indexing, structural, or formatting terms.  Indexing tags identify content, such as the place or date of a photograph. Formatting tags identify structural parts of a document , such as <heading> or display <italics> .

 Tag Cloud

A way of providing overview and access to an archive of media artifacts, such as online photo collections, by displaying metadata tags as an alphabetized array of tags whose size, color, or other visual characteristics indicates the quantity, popularity, recency, or other attribute of the tagged artifacts.  Tag clouds can be automatically generated for expanding, unregulated collections user-generated tags, making them a popular interface strategy for folksonomy collections.

 Taxonomy

A consistent, standardized classification schema for dividing a complex set of elements into hierarchically organized discrete categories and sub-categories. A taxonomy is an attempt to account for all the elements in a particular knowledge set (such as all living things) without ambiguity, and to provide category divisions that reflect expert knowledge of the field (such as cellular and non-cellular life).

Temporal Media

Media that are time-based, such as spoken language, audio and video recordings. Temporal media in digital formats can be more difficult to search and to present in overview than text documents or arrays of still images. Information organization strategies for temporal media include transcripts, descriptive metadata, playback control with fast forward and rewind, and excerpting.

Thesaurus

In general a thesaurus is a list of words and their synonyms. In information design, a thesaurus is a list of all the standardized descriptors in a controlled vocabulary, including guidance onthe correct word to use when more than one refer to the same thing (e.g. “residence,”  “house,” or “home”?) and the relationships between terms, such as which broader terms are implicitly included in narrower ones (e.g. “sister” implicitly includes “sibling” which includes “family member”).

 Think-aloud protocol

A method for studying the responses of users to interactive artifacts, by asking them to articulate for the tester what they are thinking as they use the system. See also Iterative Design, Formative Evaluative, Usability.

Thread

A form of information organization convention used in online bulletin boards and discussion groups and later adopted for email that collocates items with the same subject line, usually by stringing them together in order of the time of posting.  Some systems recognize subtopics and create hierarchies of discussion threads.

Timeline

A two-dimensional visual organizing framework for the presentation of information chronologically, usually in a left to right horizontal configuration. Timelines are useful for displaying dated artifacts in an archive or for displaying a changing, quantifiable phenomenon over time (such as occurrences of a particular proper name in the news), but the encyclopedic capacity of digital environments can make it difficult to display all the relevant items in a single line, a problem that is sometimes solved by providing a zoom feature for the timeline. Timelines have also been widely used as interfaces for “multimedia” authoring environments, where they can sometimes reinforce unisequential structureand discourage interactivity.

 Time Step

A segment of time within a computer simulation in which the state of the system is recalculated. Often in simulation games the action is explicitly paused while players make resource allocation. Time steps are also perceptible in the updating of counters or other displays in control panels of simulations, and in scientific simulations processes may be recorded and graphed by time step.

Threshold object

An object in the real world, like a game controller,  that has an effect in the virtual world, taking the interactor over the threshold from the real to the virtual, and increasing immersion by reinforcing belief in the virtual world (Murray 1997).

 Toggle

A mechanical or digital switch that is either on or off and never neutral, such that activating it will always reverse its state. The capitalization lock on computer keyboards and the power buttons of many devices are a toggle switches. The bold anditalic buttons in word processors are virtual toggle switches. In mechanical devices and in virtual displays, toggles can be confusing if they do not offer clear feedback.

 Tool Model

One of the four models  of interactivity discussed in Section V. A tool is a found or created object that fits in and extends the power of the human hand, whose value lies in its instrumentality, i.e. its usefulness in accomplishing a task. Design values for digital tools include direct manipulation, learnability,  transparency, and expanded expression. See also  Companion, Game, and Machine Models.

 Tooltip

Information that appears on rollover associated with an icon in an application program or game interface.

Transmission

With inscription and representation, one of the three components of a medium. Transmission is the transfer across space and/or time of a perceptible pattern based upon a socially agreed upon schema like the alphabet or Morse code. See also Convention, Format, Genre.

Transmission Model

Describes all exchanges of meaning between animals, people and/or machines, as the transmission of a message from point A where the sender encodes it, through a channel that maximizes signal and minimizes noise to point B where the signal is decoded by the receiver, into the original message (Shannon and Weaver 1963). Also called Information Theory, and often contrasted with Semiotic Theory.

Transclusion

A word coined by the hypertext visionary Ted Nelson, and a key feature of his proposed Xanadu hypertext system, referring to the inclusion of one text within another while maintaining a single unique copy of the original, which remains under authorial control. In Nelson’s design, the author would be able to make changes to a single original and have those changes appear in all the compound documents in which it was transcluded  (Nelson 2007).

Transparency

A desirable quality in a tool or interface, which is said to be transparent when it disappears from the awareness of the user, who focuses instead upon the task itself.  A touch-typist experiences the keyboard as transparent; a confident driver experiences the automobile controls as transparent. Transparency is achieved by direct manipulation, continuous feedback, ease of use, and familiarity. Transparency is thwarted by cumbersome input procedures, hidden and interruptive processes, and a steep learning curve, all of which make the interface opaque, obscuring the task at hand.

 Tree

See Branching Tree

Turing Test

A hypothetical test suggested by cryptographer and mathematician Alan Turing in  for distinguishing between a computer and a human being in a conversation held as an online text exchange.

U

Unisequential

A more specific term than “linear” to describe media artifacts that are read, listened to, or viewed in a single authorized sequence, like the order of pages in a book or the temporal order of a film or podcast.  Interactive documentaries and simulation games, by contrast, are multisequential, allowing the interactor to experience multiple coherent authorized sequences.

Usability

A design goal that is closely related to specific empirical methods for creating and evaluating designs aimed at achieving the goal. Usability refers to the ease with which users of digital tools and informational resources can perform tasks. Usability methods emphasize empirical observation of users, explicit error messages, efficiency in task performance, lack of ambiguity, learnability, and formative evaluation through the measurement of task performance time, error rate, interface response time, and think-aloud protocols to capture frustrations and confusions in the user’s cognitive process.

Use Case

In a design document for a software application or other interactive artifact, a use case is a scenario describing a fictional but representative user, including the social context, goals, and steps the user would take in achieving the goals. The use case serves to focus design in the early stages of development and to explain the functionality to potential new users once the artifact is built.

 User

A common term for the human being who interacts with a digital artifact, which assumes a tool and task orientation, as compared with the player of a videogame or the more inclusive interactorwho may be playing or performing a task or perhaps following a multisequential story, or exploring a virtual world.

User Testing

A crucial element of formative evaluation and iterative design for interactive artifacts.  See also Agency, Usability.  

V

Value

Used in programming for the number or text in a container whose contents can change.  Variables in programs have values, as do fields in databases, and attributes of elements in structured documents. Value lists are made for containers that have a fixed set of possible values (like provinces in Canada).

Variable

A named unit of data specified in a computer program that can change its value during the execution of the code.  Variables are “local” if they only can be read and modified by one part of a program and “global” if they can be read or modified by all parts of the program.  The opposite of a variable is a constant, which has an unchanging value, such as the mathematical constant Pi.

Vector Graphics

Digital images that are represented within a computer system as a set of instructions for drawing the geometrical components (e.g. polygons, lines, points) them rather than as a bitmap. A vector is a continuous rather than a fixed variable (a relative quantity rather than a specific number) so vector graphics can be resized without loss of information (the lines will always be drawn in the same relative proportions at the same angles no matter how long they are).

 Visibility

The design value of making the processing of the computing machine clear to the interactor before, during, and after it takes place. See also transparency.

W

 Widget

A simple program or applet that can be plugged into a common platform, like a web widget into an HTML page, and often into a proprietary platform like the Apple Dashboard.  Widgets are generally limited in function and easy to plug in or delete from the host environment.

 WIMP Interface

Acronym for the common desktop graphical user interface (GUI), standing for  Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointers.

 Wireframe

A schematic drawing of an interface, indicating the size and shape of key areas and the functionality of interactive elements, but lacking the actual graphic and textual content. Web wireframes are usually based on a grid and can be used to establish a style sheet  or template to ensure uniformity in a multi-page site. Wireframes can also be used as a focus of design team discussion and as the basis of paper-based user-testing, in order to concretize thinking about interaction early in the design process.

World Wide Web (WWW)

The global information resource invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989-1990 when he proposed and implemented the now standard protocols for addressing, displaying, and hyperlinking information over the Internet. Berners-Lee ensured continued open access and expanded shared standards of information transmission by setting up the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), which is hosted at MIT.  See also HTML, Semantic Web, XML

 WYSIWYG

An acronym for ‘What You See Is What You Get” pronounced “wiz-ee-wig.“  WYSIWYG interfaces replaced markup interfaces for word processing in the 1980’s Previously word processor required the use of codes similar to HTML, so that an italicized word would have to be coded as <i>Hello! </i> instead of appearing on the screen as Hello!  — just as it would in print.  WYSIWYG interfaces in general are desirable because they allow for direct manipulation.

X,Y,Z

XML

XML stands for Extensible Markup Language, a proposed successor to HTML developed by the W3C under the direction of Tim Berners-Lee as part of their effort to create a Semantic Web which would be better organized forinformation sharing andknowledge creation than the current World Wide Web. XML is a meta-language, a format for creating metadata sets that form the basis of structured documents.