Intelligent Label Truncation (ILT)
This entry was originally at http://kingsley.blog-city.com/read/46859.htm
Ok, that sounds heavy, but it’s rather simple. It’s an example of how “obvious” solutions can be wrong, and of how it’s important to think like people instead of thinking like a machine.
Problem : You have many documents which have the same name, but have a number appended to the end to indicate the version, like “Analysis of Website Usage1.doc”,”Analysis of Website Usage2.doc” etc? or maybe “Analysis of Website Usage-draft.doc”, “Analysis of Website Usage-client.doc”. When you want to open the document, you open the folder, which looks like this:
You can’t make out the difference between the documents. You have to resize the column, or wait for the tool-tip to appear or select it. I’ve observed users open all documents and visually compare them to find the one they want and close the rest. What a waste of time! What happens if you are using a handheld device and can’t really resize the column? This is typically what happens in technology centered design - if you cant fit it, keep “n” characters and replace the rest with “…”. Problem solved? Not really.
Solution :Intelligent Label Truncation(ILT), a scheme for truncating labels, which works the way people do. If the labels where truncated using the ILT scheme, it would look like this:
When people name their documents, they put the most important information in the beginning of the name. The next most important information, however, is found at the end of the name. Therefore, an intelligent scheme for truncation would preserve as much of the initial portion of the label as possible, while making room for the last 3 letters of the label too. This way, the most important information about the label is preserved.
We could take this further. The truncation scheme could remove insignificant words like “the”, “of”, “in” etc, and replace them with a tiny dot (to show that a word has been removed). In which case, the window would look like this:
We could improve the scheme further by replacing words with acronyms (Eg., “Tech.” instead of “Technical”), cutting out vowels and capitalizing the rest(Eg., “MKTG” instead of Marketing), attempting to maintain whole words etc. The scheme should use the same rules that people use to truncate names.
Applications and Constraints : In addition to providing better clarity and efficiency to users of desktop computers, the ILT scheme would be of great utility to users of handheld and mobile devices, where display size is severely constrained. Users of such devices often do not have the luxury of tooltips or resizing columns in order to see the entire file name for a file that they might have transferred from a desktop computer. ILT is useful in assisting users in recognizing objects that they have named themselves. Examples include folders with multiple files reprented as a list or icons, a busy taskbar with a number of windows open and recently opened files menus.
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