Gricean Maxims and UI design

During interaction, man and machine establish a sort of cooperation that, ideally, pursues a common goal. Generally, the human has his own objective in mind and the machine user interface should facilitate the task. Not rarely – and with increasing frequency –, the “machine” has its own goal and tries to start the cooperation (by means of a notification for example). These kind of processes are sometimes very similar to human “conversations”; labels, inputs, text boxes, buttons, etc. display text written in a language, thus, like in a human-to-human conversation, one of the tool at hand of the UX/UI designer is the use of the language in a meaningful, efficient and effective way.

So far, I compared some human-machine-interactions to human-to-human conversations (to cooperative ones) and I told that there are similarities between them, therefore, my interest in the philosophy of language is somehow justified. In this context, today, I would like to speak, briefly, about the well known Gricean maxims to promote a better use of the language in the UX/UI design.

Paul Grice (1913-1988) was a British philosopher of language. His Cooperative Principle states that parties involved in a conversation should use a language in a way that facilitate the achievement of the common goal; in this context, Grice listed four maxims:

Maxim of Quantity: Information

• Make your contribution as informative as required for the current purpose of the exchange.
• Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

Maxim of Quality: Truth

• Do not say what you believe to be false.
• Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

Maxim of Relation: Relevance:

• Be relevant.

Maxim of Manner: Clarity

• Avoid obscurity of expression.
• Avoid ambiguity.
• Be brief.
• Be orderly.

There are other rules that govern human conversations, “Be polite!” for example, and others, but what I would like to point out with this brief post is that wherever a designer puts a text in a UI, he should check it with this rules in mind, as a minimum.

If you would like to start a journey in this field of knowledge, here there is the Wikipedia link to the Cooperation Principle.