Understanding Context Quotes

“Complexity is to be made more clear to be understandable, even when it cannot be made more simple.”
― Andrew Hinton, Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture

“The best way to handle a situation like this is not to fake simplicity but to embrace the complexity and clarify it by making it more understandable.”
― Andrew Hinton, Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture

“will this environment be perceived and understood, in a real situation, with real people?”
― Andrew Hinton, Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture

“Similar studies confirm that the aesthetic styling of websites can strongly affect users’ opinions of their value.[”
― Andrew Hinton, Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture

“The more decontextualized an expression, the more important grammar becomes, meaning that a single comma — something that could be mistaken for a bit of lint — changes the nature of the world that phrase describes. This is true for human readers, but it’s especially true for language-parsing computers, which rely heavily on standard structural patterns for comprehending text.”
― Andrew Hinton, Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture

“For simple physical tasks, where any harm is evident immediately through feedback, negative consequences can be calibrated against by our bodies. But when complex systems are involved (whether vast, complicated bomber aircraft or organic, invisible systems such as bacteria) — systems we can’t perceive all at once and react to naturally — we need to add environmental structure to keep us on track.”
― Andrew Hinton, Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture

“The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. — UMBERTO ECO[218”
― Andrew Hinton, Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture

“The less physical information available to us, the less we can rely on the most ancient and capable aptitudes of our perceptual systems.”
― Andrew Hinton, Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture

“Logic turns the act of abstraction into a tool for determining what is true and what is false: truth can be discovered in words alone, apart from concrete experience.”[”
― Andrew Hinton, Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture

“instead of objects being nested within features of the terrain, we create our own nested terrain made of lists and categories.”
― Andrew Hinton, Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture

“When we design products and services, we are designing in the “for all practical purposes” realm. In that realm, language functions as environment. That’s because semantic function is not merely abstract; it shapes our very reality.”
― Andrew Hinton, Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture

“Figure 9-7. A graphical parking sign, by designer Nikki Sylianteng[194]”
― Andrew Hinton, Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture

“Interface metaphors don’t need to slavishly copy the physical world, but neither should they appropriate meanings only in the name of seeming familiar, without also behaving according to the expectations they set.”
― Andrew Hinton, Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture

“Outside of a carnival fun-house, irony and infrastructure shouldn’t mix. A misplaced modifier can be the equivalent of a bridge collapse.”
― Andrew Hinton, Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture

“It also shows how it’s hard to overthink context — getting it right demands some rigorous analysis.”
― Andrew Hinton, Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture

“In the systems we design, it’s the designer’s responsibility to do that work as much as possible, so the user doesn’t have to. We want our users to be able to say “sunrise,” even if it doesn’t accurately reflect the “business rules” of how the solar system actually works. It wasn’t the users’ responsibility to comprehend the complexities of Beacon; and it wasn’t my responsibility as a user of Google Calendar to comprehend that others in my company could see some parts of my calendar but not others. It was the system’s responsibility to make its environmental invariants clear to the user.”
― Andrew Hinton, Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture

“people make do in the world by satisficing. We reach for whatever tool, object, method, or mode of understanding that will get the job done with the least effort.”
― Andrew Hinton, Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture

“words are essentially copies of the objects they name.[172”
― Andrew Hinton, Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture

“User perception is important to consider when looking at the results of analytics and other performance measurements. Ten clicks might be fine, if the user is getting value out of each one (and feels like she’s getting where she needs to go); three clicks can feel like forever if the user is floundering in confusion.”
― Andrew Hinton, Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture

“We often hear users say “there’s so much clutter” in an interface. Yet, everything in an interface was put there by someone for some reason, whether warranted or not. One user’s trash is another user’s treasure. One shopper’s clutter is a marketer’s sale promotion insert.”
― Andrew Hinton, Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture

“How well we perceive context in digitally affected environments is often a matter of how well the environment clarifies what is an object that is detached or attached, what sort of object it is, whether it has agency of its own, and what rules it follows.”
― Andrew Hinton, Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture

“Perception evolved among actual substances and surfaces, made of atoms, so even in the insubstantial realm of language and bits, it still reaches for substantial information, hoping something will catch hold.”
― Andrew Hinton, Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture

“We know software isn’t physical. But because perception depends upon invariant structure, we see it and use it whenever it seems to be offered to us, even if a software code release can upset those invariants in a moment’s time. These differences and disruptions are not the sorts of behaviors we evolved to perceive with any accuracy. They are instead the black ice, or quicksand, of digital objects and places.”
― Andrew Hinton, Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture

“The properties of user interfaces need to be consistent for us to learn them well. We hunger for stable landmarks in the often-ambiguous maze of digital interfaces.”
― Andrew Hinton, Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture

“We’re used to thinking of design as creating an intricately engineered setting for the user, for which every act has been accounted. But the contextual meaning of the environment is never permanently established, because context is a function of the active engagement of the user. This means the primary aim of the designer is not to design ways for the artifact to be used but instead to design the artifact to be clearly understood,[66] so the user can recruit it into her full environmental experience in whatever way she needs.”
― Andrew Hinton, Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture

“Users aren’t motivated by first understanding the environment. They’re too busy just getting things done, and in fact they tend to improvise as they go, often using the environment in different ways than intended by designers.[”
― Andrew Hinton, Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture

“Satisficing is a valuable idea for design practice, because it reminds us that users use what we design. They don’t typically ponder it, analyze it, or come to know all its marvelous secrets. They act in the world based on the most obvious information available and with as little concentration as possible.”
― Andrew Hinton, Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture

“(UX) design is all about: including the experiential reality of the user as a primary input to design rather than relying only on the goals of a business or the needs of a technology. Embodied cognition is a way of understanding more deeply how users have experiences, and how even subtle changes in the environment can have profound impacts on those experiences.”
― Andrew Hinton, Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture

“Never memorize something that you can look up. —ALBERT EINSTEIN”
― Andrew Hinton, Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture

“When watching people use gadgets and software, we need to remember that the way they’re making use of their context is largely being determined by the structures available to them. Often, I have heard e-commerce clients complain that their customers are using the online shopping cart improperly, as a sort of wish-list, even when the site provides a separate wish-list function. Though when you look at the environment neutrally as a cluster of environmental structures, it becomes clear that Add to Cart is usually a much easier and quicker function to find and use than Add to Wish-List — the button tends to be more prominent, more available, and the “Cart” itself is always represented somewhere (normally as a concrete metaphor with a picture of a cart) regardless of where the user is shopping. Why wouldn’t the user make use of such an available, straightforward environmental structure over a less-available abstraction?”
― Andrew Hinton, Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture