A Few Notes about CASCADE Idiosyncrasies

In the design of an interactive system, it is normally good practice to make the interface consistent with other interfaces of the same type that people have used. A corollary of this rule is that when things are different, they should be made different at the interface so people will notice the difference. There are a few things about CASCADE that are different, and we want to bring them to your attention:

1. Most users have grown accustomed to double clicking on a PC when they want to select something. At the current time, all selections in CASCADE are accomplished with a SINGLE click. We have tried to make sure that double clicking is ignored, but the user may encounter a situation, if the user does double click, where CASCADE becomes confused because it interprets his/her actions as two separate commands. Try to remember to always SINGLE click to make a choice.

2. CASCADE has no ``working'' indicator. Most systems provide a cursor shape that tells the user the system is busy. (A rotating ball or an hour glass.) We have put no such cursor in CASCADE. The reason for this, is that our design goal and commitment is to always have CASCADE ready when the user is. There should be no wait. Unfortunately, as we are developing CASCADE, we sometimes put new code in for the user to use before it has been optimized. This means that occasionally, the user will experience delays before CASCADE acts, please let us know when this bothers you.

3. CASCADE has made some changes in the normal positioning of things. For example, the user will note when the user is viewing a document, that the vertical scrollbar is on the left and not the right. The reason it was moved was to allow users to quickly move within and between documents with minimal mouse movements. Thus the scrollbar is located close to the document selection window. As you begin to review many documents with lots of comments, we hope you will agree that this makes sense.

4. CASCADE relies a lot on colors for meaning. Humans have an ability to process colors and color patterns with extreme speed. Much use of colors has been made in CASCADE to allow the experienced user to quickly assess what is going on. Keep in mind that CASCADE is for people that work a lot on group documents. Unfortunately that means that it is optimized for experienced users and will take a little time to get used to.