Cognition: Human–Computer Communication - Foundations for Designing User-Centered Systems - page 200

Table 7.1 Several of Grice's ( 1975 ) maxims of conversation
Consider saving some examples as they come up
Maxim of quantity
Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange)
Do not make your contribution more informative than is required
Maxim of quality
Do not say what you believe to be false
Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence
Maxim of relevance
Be relevant
Maxim of manner
Avoid obscurity of expression
Avoid ambiguity
Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity)
Be orderly
Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs,
by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged. (p. 45)
Although phrased prescriptively—it basically says try to say the right thing at
the right time—the co-operative principle can also be seen as a description of the
way that people normally converse. Grice suggested that there are four basic
maxims underlying the co-operative principle as shown in Table 7.1 . These
maxims make strong suggestions about how people should communicate with
other people. When these suggestions are followed, communication is more suc-
cessful and more satisfying. When these maxims are not followed, you can often
note humor, irony, mistakes, rudeness, and ill-feelings. As you read through these
maxims, you should be able to think of examples (and counterexamples) of their
use in interfaces.
Although these maxims refer to conversation, they can also be applied to facil-
itate better written communication as well. Help messages, manuals, and instruc-
tions should be informative, and avoid telling the user things that they do not need to
know. The system should not report errors where errors do not exist. Help from
automatic aids should be relevant to the task the user is doing, not to another task or
to a task that has already been completed. One of the exercises at the end of this
chapter encourages you to consider the application of these principles in more depth.
7.2.3 Implications for System Design
The use of language is an important topic for interface design, because interfaces
often provide a language—possibly an informal, specialized language—for com-
munication. This language provides a way to understand the interaction elements
and their structure, how users interact with the system, and how interfaces can be