From: owner-3dui@hitl.washington.edu on behalf of Jeff Pierce
[jpierce@cs.cmu.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, December 20, 2000 1:45 PM
To: 3dui List
Cc: Rex Hartson
Subject: Re: notation for 3D interaction techniques

At 01:17 PM 12/20/00, Rex Hartson wrote:
>On Wed, 29 Nov 2000, Jeff Pierce wrote:
>> 
>> How many people do you know that actually use UAN?  Not counting the
>> researchers who invented it, mind.  =)
>Hello, all. I have more or less an eavesdropper to this thread and don't
>disagree with much of what has been said, but thought I should respond to
>this one point, sincce I am one of the researchers who "invented" the UAN
>(ooops, shouldn't have copied me on this one:).

That'll teach me to exaggerate when trying to make a point.  ;)

>We haven't worked on the UAN for a long time here, but back when we were
>working on it, we had over a hundred real developers using it at various
>places in the world.  I still get feedback from real users out there,
>including this one I got last week (name not used, to protect the
>guilty/innocent):
>"My team has been experimenting with UAN for a little while now on a very
>large, internationalized software program, and we believe that it will
>yield better communication among team members."

I'm not saying that no one uses UAN; for all I know there are several
hundred people that do.  But what percentage of active user interface
developers is that?  If you gave a talk at CHI in front of several hundred
people and used UAN to describe your new technique, how many do you think
would be able to understand what you were talking about?

There's obviously nothing wrong with creating a 3D UI specification
language: specification languages (e.g. Zed) are used to great effect in a
variety of fields.  But it's important to have realistic expectations: any
language isn't going to be an "end all and be all" solution (I challenge
whoever believes it will be to invent the one, true programming language).
Flow charts will work better for describing some techniques, pseudo-code
for others, and plain old English for still others.  And obviously the
harder it is to use the new specification language, the fewer people that
will do so.  Maybe we need to open a new research area: usability analysis
of specification languages.  We could fold in regular programming languages
as well; lord knows they could use some usability engineering.

Jeff