Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  Syntactic Knowledge and Visual Knowledge (24 May 2004) A typical example is that of programmers using a visual tool to design an object oriented program by visually drawing classes, objects and relationships. A skilled programmer is much faster typing than using a mouse. Certain actions need several clicks of the mouse when browsing through the hierarchies, becoming cumbersome when you need to use them repeatedly. It appears that, invariably, the advanced users, the professionals of programming and in general the so called 'power users' end up adopting the syntactic knowledge of the interface, be it the command line or the keyboard shortcuts that GUIs also offer. For the rest of the mere mortals, that don’t have the time nor the need to go beyond this, they use visual knowledge, much easier to acquire and to understand. Article URL: http://www.infovis.net/printMag.php?num=146&lang=2 Read 159 more articles from InfoVis sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Thirty Years With Computers     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy