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The lost art of description
I was just walking through a shopping centre, and some random girl walking in the opposite direction handed me a flyer as she passed. I looked at the flyer, but it wasn't entirely obvious what it was advertising. The large print just says ‘TwentyTwo’, and ‘Free admission to any of these events with this flyer’, and ‘join us over the festive season’. After reading the smaller print, which says things like ‘over 18s’ and ‘10pm till 3am’ and describes a dress code, I've concluded that it's a nightclub of some sort, but (a) I'm still none the wiser about what kind of nightclub (what music? what sort of people? is there any particular reason I might want to go to it?), and (b) it seems barking mad that I should have had to read as far as the small print to even get that far!
Now I think about it, this seems symptomatic of a more widespread tendency I've been noticing here and there for a while, which is that people increasingly seem unwilling to spend the effort to tell other people what things are.
Another good case of this: two months ago, somebody sent me a link to some website's terms-
Computer industry marketing is another area in which this sort of thing is widespread. Occasionally somebody will mention a computer-
Finally, you also get a lot of this sort of thing in blogs and discussion forums, where people will post a URL without any explanation of what it is or why you might want to visit it. If it's a web forum, one might argue that it only takes a couple of seconds to find out for yourself, but even so, the Usenet effort economy still applies: thirty seconds of one writer's time works out to less overall than two seconds each of twenty readers', and if lots of people post bare URLs then I don't have two seconds to spare for all of them so I'd like some means of deciding which ones are worth looking at in advance. Particularly bad is if the link goes via one of those URL-
I'm not asking for huge elaborate descriptions of things which remove any need for me to go and read the actual thing. I just think that writing, say, ten words or so to give people the first idea of what something is shouldn't be that difficult for anybody, and yet it seems to be taking the first steps toward becoming a lost art.
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I had an idea ages ago (after seeing some similarly minimally-informational flyers, possibly a teaser campaign i.e. with further detail to be provided later) that it would be funny to put up flyers for Christmas as if it was some sort of event. You know -- "CHRISTMAS. Dec 25th. 00:01 - 23:59."
Increasingly I'm finding Wikipedia fills this niche for me
I find Google's "define:" can be quite handy if what I need is a quick "what's this all about?" definition. (Tested it on 'UML' and it gave me several answers that sounded reasonably lucid and sensible, though probably not enough detail for what you want.)
Particularly bad is if the link goes via one of those URL-squashing services which removes any chance of you being able to look at the URL itself in advance and know whether it's a news site or a comedy site or what.
Guilty: I admit I've often done that deliberately because otherwise the surprise of the picture/film/mp3/whatever would be spoilt by the URL. ("Hey, that reminds me of something I saw the other day: http://www.made-up-website.com/kitten_trapped_in_photocopier.jpg") OTOH I do try to say at least specify "funny thing" or "requires flash/sound" or "(N)SFW".
I just think that writing, say, ten words or so to give people the first idea of what something is shouldn't be that difficult for anybody
I would normally have agreed that it should be easy (and I think in some cases it is) but it's just taken me about an hour to put together a pitiful amount of words (maybe 500?) on what $thing is, why people should give a damn, and where they can find out more (including 'here's a link, this is what's at the other end of it'). It's particularly disconcerting to be trying to write about something that Wikipedia doesn't seem to have an article about, as that's normally where I
steal ideasget my inspiration.no subject
Yes, granted: that one occasionally happens to me too.
OTOH I do try to say at least specify "funny thing" or "requires flash/sound" or "(N)SFW"
Well, that's fine then; that's all I ask, really. For the above one, something like "very silly headline" would be more than sufficient: it tells people it's a news article, it tells them why they might want to read it, and that's all that's needed.
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[UML is for describing system architecture and behaviour, in a way that allows non-technical people to understand how it all works. They can see that the behaviour meets their requirements, and the techies can take the architecture description and implement it (indeed, with the right tools and a sufficiently detailed model you can have the code auto-generated for you, although that's not always a good idea). Meanwhile the system designers can show how the implemented architecture meets the requirements, yada yada. I've never actually found UML that useful in the real world, but it *is* a good concept.]
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How about this, then:
It's a modelling language that defines syntaxes for different types of diagrams relating to system design (eg FSMs, message sequence charts, user interactions, object hierarchies) and a framework for fitting them together to provide a coherent (hopefully :-)) system architecture that can (again, hopefully :-)) be understood by techies and non-techies alike.
It has a string of other claims associated with it, including things like self-documenting systems (if you've written the UML model and developed the code from it, there's no need for further documentation) and making development faster and more reliable with less need for skilled programmers (if your system architect has designed the model, she doesn't need to know the intricacies of C or C++ or Java syntax to implement it - just press a button and bing, there it is).
As I tried to imply above, I'm not really sure that it does actually achieve any of these otherwise laudable aims.
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- the types of diagram and their visual syntaxes and symbol sets actually are pretty much the whole of UML, and there's no textual component that goes with them
- the sole purpose of a UML model is to communicate information about systems' structure between people (i.e. it isn't a "modelling" language in the sense of "simulation", and doesn't give you ways to predict how the system will behave other than thinking very hard about it in the conventional non-UML-based way).
Are those accurate? Because neither one was something I was entirely sure about before this conversation, so I'm learning new facts here which I suspect most UML people would have seen as so basic that they'd have forgotten to tell them to me.no subject
Second bullet: yes, although there are some tools that can help you iron out some of the issues (like warning you that you've got a use case that isn't covered by any of your state transitions, or a message sequence that can never get triggered).
There is also a "real time extension" for UML that claims to allow you to add clocks and timers and whatnot to your diagrams, and I bet that would also then allow you to simulate stuff happening (again, with the right tools). However, I have never met anybody who had a good word to say about that, other than the people who sell the tools :-)
I suspect some UML proponents would make far greater claims for it than I am making here - my knowledge is based on a years-ago training course which I have used very infrequently since.
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UML is for describing system architecture and behaviour, in a way that allows non-technical people to understand how it all works
eg FSMs, message sequence charts, user interactions, object hierarchies
I'm having a hard time imagining these two things as remotely compatible. (Also the first reminds me of COBOL.)
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Gorgeous concise writing is not a lost art, just rare.
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* It's deliberate, they know their target audience knows what a nightclub flier looks like, and don't much care about anyone else, so spend the first 500ms telling those people what's cool about this one (generally "has a black background" :))
* It's a mistake. But I wouldn't say they were just being lazy or careless, like everyone else, but actually fucking up. If you're writing on a message board, you don't care so much, and people are likely to be curious what you said. If you're writing a flier, you have to do it right or you're wasting your time.
I agree with your point though, I've ranted about it before. Aim the information you provide at the person receiving it, not you!
Many websites have an "about" link fairly prominently. Some even have the front page be a brief introduction to what they are, and an inner main page for regulars. When they don't, you can just see the designer having a little wishful picture in his head of someone who already knows what foo is, and designing the site for them, meaning every new user just stares blankly and leaves.
And I agree entirely with links. If there's just one "Hey, look at this" link I'll go out of curiosity, but I already see several a day, and don't follow them all. If I do, obviously being pleasantly surprised is good. But more likely I can't be bothered. It doesn't have to be neat, just put a three word title next to the link if you like, but I want to know.
I often browse several web pages and blogs at once, opening every interesting entry in another tab, and also every interesting link. So if you say "The third picture of a cat is hilarious" then I'll remember, otherwise I'll lose track of who made me open it, not know why it's interesting, and close it again. Just saying the website name is good, then I know if I know the site already, and then remember what it is later.
Not every communication can be preceded by a thoughtful evaluation of how someone will receive it. Online, it should be more so, as there's no instead feedback of eyebrow raising, etc, to signal ambiguity.
Although even in real life I'm often annoyed by things like this. Someone encouraging me to do something says why it's good for them, not good for me. Shops, etc, hide all relevant information, making it a gigantic hurdle to go there.
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People just can't seem to understand that other people don't know everything on the inside of their heads any more when trying to persuade people to buy something. It's like a national outbreak of specific autism.
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Yes, that is the point at which it seems particularly odd. Some websites, you might reasonably imagine, don't need to tell outsiders what they are because they're there for a specific set of insiders who already know; but if somebody's trying to sell me something, it surely has to be in their interest to ensure I actually have some idea what it is?
(Unless, I suppose, the item is so dreadful that if I knew what it actually was I wouldn't even consider buying it...)
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