Here is an excerpt:
As a modern society, we interact with many things in our lives: from household appliances and mobile devices to pencil sharpeners and door handles. We take these everyday things for granted and interact with them seamlessly, but the truth is, there was a thorough design process for each and every one of them. Don Norman talks about this very problem in his book, the Design of Everyday Things [1] If everything was designed perfectly, everyone is happy. Sometimes however, the way we think an object should be used, differs from how the designers envisioned it. There is no sign on a door; should we pull the door or should we push it?
Since Norman’s book was first published in 1990, people’s notion of everyday things have grown to include more than just tangible objects. Every day, people interact with their operating systems, email clients, web browsers, search engines, web applications, games, etc. For these systems to function efficiently, users need to understand how to use them. Unfortunately, sometimes the same cognitive gap between user and designer becomes an obstacle. Consider searching for records in a digital library as an example. A 1998 survey indicated that a major usability problem with digital libraries is in finding the appropriate keywords for search [2]. In other words, users are having difficulty interacting with the search engine. Here and beyond digital libraries, the cognitive gap is often about translating user needs and/or tasks into keywords.
How can we close this cognitive gap? Perhaps we invite users to naturally express their needs and tasks in writing. Can we use NLP to understand them? (continued...)
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