On Friday July 8 2005 7:38 am, Stephen R Laniel wrote: > In some ways automobile and road designers have a nice > constraint: they *can't* assume that their drivers are > > a) literate, Actually, road engineers intrinsically rely on literacy. You cannot get a driver's license in Oregon unless you can read enough English to understand highway signs. There isn't a pictograph for things like, "FREEWAY TRAFFIC STOPPED AHEAD, DRAWBRIDGE OPEN" or "DO NOT PASS SNOWPLOWS ON [LEFT|RIGHT]". Then there's times where a pictograph is not clear, but words are. A good example would be a sign commonly found in the desert southwest. They used to say, "CAUTION: ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS CROSSING FREEWAY" Now instead of words, they have a rather human-racially unflattering pictograph of a man and woman dragging a child. The former very clearly indicates that there may be desperate people creating a dangerous situation on the road. I had no idea what the pictograph meant for nearly two years after they were introduced until someone from Arizona Highway Patrol told me that the signs meant "illegal immigrant crossing" and was chosen to replace words to be politically correct. Heck, some places I saw the signs I hadn't the foggiest idea that I was that close to the border (open desert looks almost the same to me, I can tell the desert pacific northwest[1] from the desert pacific southwest without a map, but that's about it). Only the most basic ideas can be described in a silhouette pictograph. > If they assume any of these things, people die. It would be > nice if usability engineers for computer software had to > work under similar constraints. And it would be nice if I could retire tomorrow while I'm still in my 20s and young enough to get the absolute maximum humanly possible out of it, too. But the days of assuming there's anything less than near-ubiquitous literacy in modern society are ancient history. [1] Common misconception: Only a third of the northwest has trees. The rest is open, mostly uninhabitable high desert. -- Paul Johnson Email and Instant Messenger (Jabber): baloo@ursine.ca http://ursine.ca/~baloo/
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