I found the current UI intuitive. I find the four-pointed star you suggested confusing (though mayyyybe I’d like it if I got used to it?). I tend to mix up my left and my right, and I don’t associate left/right with false/true at all, nor do I associate blue with “truth”. (if anything, I associate blue more with goodness, so I might have guessed dark-blue was ‘good and true’ and light-blue was ‘good and false’)
A version of this I’m confident would be easier for me to track is, e.g.:
It’s less pretty, but:
The shapes give me an indication of what each direction means. ✔ and ✖ I think are very useful and clear in that respect: to me, they’re obviously about true/false rather than good/bad.
Green vs. red still isn’t super clear. But it’s at least clearer than blue vs. red, to me; and if I forget what the colors mean, I have clear indicators via ‘ah, there’s a green X, but no green checkmark, because the heart is the special “good on all dimensions” symbol, and because green means “good” (so it would be redundant to have a green heart and a green checkmark)’.
The left and right options are smaller and more faded. Some consequences:
(a) This makes the image as a whole feel less overwhelming, because there’s a clear hierarchy that encourages me to first pay attention to one thing, then only consider the other thing as an afterthought. In this case, I first notice the heart and X, which give me an anchor for what green, red, and X mean. Then I notice the smaller symbols, which I can then use my anchors to help interpret. This is easier than trying to parse four symbols at the exact same moment, especially when those symbols have complicated interactions rather than being primitives.
I think this points at the core reason Duncan’s proposal is harder for me to fit in my head than the status quo: my working memory can barely handle four things at once, and the four options here are really ordered pairs. At least, my brain thinks of them as ordered pairs rather than as primitives: I don’t have four distinct qualia or images or concepts for (true, good), (true, bad), (false, good), and (false,bad), I just have the dichotomies “true v. false” and “good v. bad”. Trying to compare all four options at once overloads my brain, whereas trying to compare two things (good v. bad) and then two other things (true v. false) is a lot easier for me.
Having a “heart” symbol is a step in the right direction in that respect, because it’s closer to “a unitary concept” in my mind rather than “an ordered pair”. If I had four very clearly distinct symbols for the four options, and they all made sense to me and were hard to confuse for each other, then that might more-or-less solve the problem for me.
(b) This makes it easier for me to chunk the two faded options as a separate category, and to think my way to ‘what does these mean?’ hierarchically: first I notice that these are the two ‘mixed’ options (because they’re small and faded and off to the sides), then I notice which one is ‘true mixed’ versus ‘false mixed’ (because true mixed will have a check, while false mixed has an X).
Here’s a version that’s probably closer to what would actually work for me:
Now all four are closer to being conceptual primitives for me. 💚 is ‘good on all the dimensions’; ❌ is ‘bad on all the dimensions’.
The facepalm emoji is meant to evoke a specific emotional reaction: that exasperated feeling I get when I see someone saying a thing that’s technically true but is totally irrelevant, or counter-productive. (Colored purple because purple is an ‘ambiguous but bad-leaning’ color, e.g., in Hollywood movies, and is associated with villainy and trolling.)
The shaking-head icon is meant to evoke another emotional reaction: the feeling of being a teacher who’s happy with their student’s performance, but is condescendingly shaking their head to say “No, you got the wrong answer”. (Colored blue because blue is ‘ambiguous but good-leaning’ and is associated with innocence and youthful naïveté.)
Neither of these emotional reactions capture the range of situations where I’d want to vote (true,bad) or (false,good). But my goal is to give me a vivid, salient handle at all on what the symbols might mean, at a glance; I think the hard part for me is rapidly distinguishing the symbols at all when there are so many options, not so much ‘figuring out the True Meaning of the symbol once I’ve distinguished it from the other three’.
I don’t like my own proposals, so do the disagree-votes mean that you agree with me that these are bad proposals, or do they mean you disagree with me and think they’re good? :P
I found the current UI intuitive. I find the four-pointed star you suggested confusing (though mayyyybe I’d like it if I got used to it?). I tend to mix up my left and my right, and I don’t associate left/right with false/true at all, nor do I associate blue with “truth”. (if anything, I associate blue more with goodness, so I might have guessed dark-blue was ‘good and true’ and light-blue was ‘good and false’)
A version of this I’m confident would be easier for me to track is, e.g.:
It’s less pretty, but:
The shapes give me an indication of what each direction means. ✔ and ✖ I think are very useful and clear in that respect: to me, they’re obviously about true/false rather than good/bad.
Green vs. red still isn’t super clear. But it’s at least clearer than blue vs. red, to me; and if I forget what the colors mean, I have clear indicators via ‘ah, there’s a green X, but no green checkmark, because the heart is the special “good on all dimensions” symbol, and because green means “good” (so it would be redundant to have a green heart and a green checkmark)’.
The left and right options are smaller and more faded. Some consequences:
(a) This makes the image as a whole feel less overwhelming, because there’s a clear hierarchy that encourages me to first pay attention to one thing, then only consider the other thing as an afterthought. In this case, I first notice the heart and X, which give me an anchor for what green, red, and X mean. Then I notice the smaller symbols, which I can then use my anchors to help interpret. This is easier than trying to parse four symbols at the exact same moment, especially when those symbols have complicated interactions rather than being primitives.
I think this points at the core reason Duncan’s proposal is harder for me to fit in my head than the status quo: my working memory can barely handle four things at once, and the four options here are really ordered pairs. At least, my brain thinks of them as ordered pairs rather than as primitives: I don’t have four distinct qualia or images or concepts for (true, good), (true, bad), (false, good), and (false,bad), I just have the dichotomies “true v. false” and “good v. bad”. Trying to compare all four options at once overloads my brain, whereas trying to compare two things (good v. bad) and then two other things (true v. false) is a lot easier for me.
Having a “heart” symbol is a step in the right direction in that respect, because it’s closer to “a unitary concept” in my mind rather than “an ordered pair”. If I had four very clearly distinct symbols for the four options, and they all made sense to me and were hard to confuse for each other, then that might more-or-less solve the problem for me.
(b) This makes it easier for me to chunk the two faded options as a separate category, and to think my way to ‘what does these mean?’ hierarchically: first I notice that these are the two ‘mixed’ options (because they’re small and faded and off to the sides), then I notice which one is ‘true mixed’ versus ‘false mixed’ (because true mixed will have a check, while false mixed has an X).
Here’s a version that’s probably closer to what would actually work for me:
Now all four are closer to being conceptual primitives for me. 💚 is ‘good on all the dimensions’; ❌ is ‘bad on all the dimensions’.
The facepalm emoji is meant to evoke a specific emotional reaction: that exasperated feeling I get when I see someone saying a thing that’s technically true but is totally irrelevant, or counter-productive. (Colored purple because purple is an ‘ambiguous but bad-leaning’ color, e.g., in Hollywood movies, and is associated with villainy and trolling.)
The shaking-head icon is meant to evoke another emotional reaction: the feeling of being a teacher who’s happy with their student’s performance, but is condescendingly shaking their head to say “No, you got the wrong answer”. (Colored blue because blue is ‘ambiguous but good-leaning’ and is associated with innocence and youthful naïveté.)
Neither of these emotional reactions capture the range of situations where I’d want to vote (true,bad) or (false,good). But my goal is to give me a vivid, salient handle at all on what the symbols might mean, at a glance; I think the hard part for me is rapidly distinguishing the symbols at all when there are so many options, not so much ‘figuring out the True Meaning of the symbol once I’ve distinguished it from the other three’.
I don’t like my own proposals, so do the disagree-votes mean that you agree with me that these are bad proposals, or do they mean you disagree with me and think they’re good? :P
(I should have phrased this as a bald assertion rather than a question, so people could (dis)agree with it to efficiently reply. :P)
For me it meant “I think this is a bad proposal”.
For what it’s worth, the head icon doesn’t read to me at all like a condescending head-shake. My brain parses it as “contented face plus halo”.