I have 1 IM window with two conversations in it, one with you about CommYou, the other with my sweetie about what's for dinner. I get a message saying 'you're crazy'. If it is from B, I know my thought for pork tartar has been vetoed, from you that my programming needs work. I don't care which conversation I started first, nor probably do I remember. If the last comment from either of you has scrolled off, I would have to scroll up just to get the right context. If however, the person's name of icon was there, that would tell me all I needed to know.
Second scenario, I am having two conversations (with possibly overlapping groups of people), knowing who said what isn't enough to unambiguously identify context. Here is where I need a subject identifier. The number of conversation would serve that purpose, but again, I either have to keep that bit of knowledge in my brain at all times (not going to happen), or scroll back and look at previous bits of conversation, find one which matches the current number, and identify the context from it (which may be difficult), then scroll back down, and re-evaluate the new material in the proper context. Or, I could have a more useful indicator of context in each new entry. Ideal would be a user specified one, but I think even a random one with enough uniqueness might do the trick.
You are providing an information-less tag, and if that is all you want to do, you would be better off with one which takes up less space (color for instance).
One of the lessons I took from Tufte is that you don't want to force people to do table lookups. It is better to label things directly than to label them with something that they then to look somewhere else to find the meaning.
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Date: 2008-07-25 12:58 am (UTC)I have 1 IM window with two conversations in it, one with you about CommYou, the other with my sweetie about what's for dinner. I get a message saying 'you're crazy'. If it is from B, I know my thought for pork tartar has been vetoed, from you that my programming needs work. I don't care which conversation I started first, nor probably do I remember. If the last comment from either of you has scrolled off, I would have to scroll up just to get the right context. If however, the person's name of icon was there, that would tell me all I needed to know.
Second scenario, I am having two conversations (with possibly overlapping groups of people), knowing who said what isn't enough to unambiguously identify context. Here is where I need a subject identifier. The number of conversation would serve that purpose, but again, I either have to keep that bit of knowledge in my brain at all times (not going to happen), or scroll back and look at previous bits of conversation, find one which matches the current number, and identify the context from it (which may be difficult), then scroll back down, and re-evaluate the new material in the proper context. Or, I could have a more useful indicator of context in each new entry. Ideal would be a user specified one, but I think even a random one with enough uniqueness might do the trick.
You are providing an information-less tag, and if that is all you want to do, you would be better off with one which takes up less space (color for instance).
One of the lessons I took from Tufte is that you don't want to force people to do table lookups. It is better to label things directly than to label them with something that they then to look somewhere else to find the meaning.
Thank You Kindly.