I installed Marco Polo today. It seems like a useful application, but it left me wondering. What are some ways to represent decisions that involve uncertainty in user interfaces?
The first mental framework that came to mind was the different types of measurement scales. An ordinal scale might make sense, but it’s hard to order things when there might not be an inherent ordering. Ratio and Interval wouldn’t do the trick here. At the same time, this nominal scale just doesn’t work in my mind.
iTunes has a nice interface for building playlists.
It’s an interface for defining and setting rules; maybe this would be more appropriate for Marco Polo’s interface? To go a little bit deeper, what does it mean to have 50% confidence that my Monitor is Color LCD?
I’m curious about this now. What are some other common UIs that involve making decisions based on uncertainty?