I’ve already discussed formalizers briefly a couple of days ago, and I’ll go on exploring them in future posts as well; but in order to be thorough, I’ll paraphrase:

Formalizers are form fields that accept text input of a specific kind, and allow the users some flexibility to input text in a more natural way.  The formalizer mechanism then takes the input, interprets it, and converts it into formal input that the application can understand.

For example, take a look at Remember The Milk; an amazing web application, hands down.  One of its nicest features is the ability to make task creation a little easier for the user. Most of their fields require some sort of format – like the Due date field shown below.  Editing this field is not done traditionally through drop down lists, or even a calendar popup, but simply by typing in your preference in natural language.  The screencapture below shows how I simply typed the word “tomorrow”, and the formalizer engine understood it and returned the correct date:

The Phenomenon

Science fiction movies have always shown computers that you can actually talk to like human beings; but alongside that fantasy lies a disappointing reality of a long history of people talking down to computers, asking them to do their bidding in the most unintelligent way imaginable.  We’ve actually developed a new way of communicating with computers – mainly through forms – since we understood very early on that using our natural language around computers was like asking a banana to peal itself.

However, in recent years we’ve seen applications start to make an effort in order to actually understand us users and how we express ourselves naturally.  Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a fascinating field of computer science that strives to help applications both express themselves to humans in a natural form, and to understand what they’re saying.  The science fiction fantasy of HAL actually speaking and understanding people is slowly becoming a reality.

So what’s the big deal?

I realize that many product marketing and product development people out there ask themselves “why should we care?  This is all technical stuff – let the lab-rats deal with it!”  That couldn’t be farther from the truth.  When you’ll understand formalizers and NLP, you’ll realize that a true revolution is taking place in user experience.

We are experiencing a surge of applications that allow people to share content for free with anyone they like.  I believe mass content is not a passing trend, but is the truest form the internet has taken so far.  It’s here to stay, at least for a while.

Some of these applications work with rich media, like YouTube and Flickr, and some with simple text, like Wikipedia and Remember The Milk.  Sharing rich media content is easy – you simply upload a file and you’re done, and provide some metadata to it, such as a title, description and tags.  However, when uploading simple text-based content, we usually get stuck with the most tedious yet annoyingly common way of text-based content acquisition – forms.

With the constant evolution of formalizer fields, and the incorporation of NLP into traditional forms, things are starting to look slightly brighter for us poor users.  We can begin to actually think and act as human beings around these applications, and rely on them to understand us a little better than their predecessors.  It’s amazing how gratifying it is to use your own words with an application when telling it that the due date for a specific task is “tomorrow” rather than filling in a date form packed with drop-down lists.

Formalizer fields, I believe, will only evolve to be more sophisticated and capable of accepting text in a natural language.  At the very least, they should evolve to a point where more computer illiterate people can start communicating properly with applications.

Any product department that is involved with a text-based, content related product should focus their efforts on providing more formalized fields to users – not only to make their application more usable, but to lower the bar for more people so that they can generate more content.  Needless to say, the more content we have as a company, and the more users we have, the more interesting and useful our product is.  And as content, especially online content, becomes an increasingly common thing in our lives, we’re bound to encounter more and more NLP formalizers as time goes by.

So play it again, Sam.

Tags: advanced forms, form design, formalizer field, Formalizers, Remember The Milk, Watch-over forms