#34514
Usability Tips for Your Application (Part I)
There are a exponentially growing amount of applications being developed. Some of them vanish at an early stage, while others grow to be quite (and sometimes extremely) popular. What really dazzles me is how sucky many of them (both the popular and the unpopular ones) are regarding how they deal with user-interaction.
Odden, Michael. Unlimited Edition (2009). Articles>Usability>User Interface>Interaction Design
#34539
Top-Ten Information Architecture (IA) Mistakes
Structure and navigation must support each other and integrate with search and across subsites. Complexity, inconsistency, hidden options, and clumsy UI mechanics prevent users from finding what they need.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2009). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>User Interface
#34563
Great Designs Should Be Experienced and Not Seen
When things are going well in a design, we don't pay attention to them. We only pay attention to things that bother us. The same is true with online designs. We attend to things that aren't working far more than we attend to things that are. When the online experience frustrates us, we pay attention to its details, often because we're trying to figure out some way to outsmart it.
Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering (2009). Articles>Web Design>User Experience>User Interface
#34903
ウェブサイトは、その構造とナビゲーションシステムとが互いに支え合っていなければならない。検索システムとも結びついていなければならない。サブサイトに至るまで一体化していなければならない。複雑で、一貫性が無く、選択肢が隠れていて、UIが扱いにくければ、ユーザーは必要なものを見つけられない。
Nielsen, Jakob. Usability.gr.jp (2009). (Japanese) Articles>Web Design>Information Design>User Interface
#34935
Being "minimalist" and "streamlined" is not always most effective. Have you ever written yourself a quick, shorthand note, only to find later that you had no way to unpack your own great idea? Icons work similarly. They are pictures – meant to provide a visual shorthand to users moving through a task. While research indicates that icons are best when initially paired with text to increase recognition and learnability, users experienced with a given set of icons will begin to ignore the text, scanning for and acting from the image alone.
Michaels, Mary M. UI Design Newsletter (2007). Articles>Graphic Design>User Interface
#34950
Beware of Style in Icon Design!
The icons or baby faces used as part of user interface have now turned into a major aspect of product branding. With powerful computers, enhanced graphics capabilities, advanced tools for illustration, and professionals to advocate rich user experience, icon design has become more important and complex than ever before! Windows Vista has raised the standard of quality icons even higher. An interface design project forced me to think about ’style’ in icon design. It raised some basic questions in my mind.
Katre, Dinesh S. Journal of HCI Vistas (2007). Design>User Interface>Graphic Design
#34969
Search Goal Redefinition Through User-System Interaction 
The purpose of this research is to examine search goal redefinition during users' interaction with information retrieval systems.
Hider, Philip M. Journal of Documentation (2007). Articles>Web Design>Search>User Interface
#35071
The Yahoo! User Interface Library
The YUI Library is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML and AJAX. YUI is available under a BSD license and is free for all uses.
#35101
Inside Out: Interaction Design for Augmented Reality
While ubiquitous computing remains an unpleasant mouthful of techno-babble to most people who know the term, and everyware is still an essentially unknown idea, the visibility of augmented reality has surged in the last twelve months.
Lamantia, Joe. UXmatters (2009). Articles>User Interface>User Experience>Information Design
#35173
Affordance allows us to look at something and intuitively understand how to interact with it. For example, when we see a small button next to a door, we know we should push it with a finger. Convention tells us it will make a sound, notifying the homeowner that someone is at the door. This concept transfers to the virtual environment: when we see a 3D-shaped button on a web page, we understand that we are supposed to “push” it with a mouse-click.
Link-Rodrigue, Margit. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Web Design>User Interface>Usability
#35459
Minimizing Complexity In User Interfaces
Clean. Easy to use. User-friendly. Intuitive. This mantra is proclaimed by many but often gets lost in translation. The culprit: complexity. How one deals with complexity can make or break an application. A complex interface can disorient the user in a mild case and completely alienate them in an extreme case. But if you take measures first to reduce actual complexity and then to minimize perceived complexity, the user will be rewarded with a gratifying experience.
Tate, Tyler. Smashing (2009). Design>User Interface>Minimalism
#35577
Fortunately, you don't see dialogs in web apps much, but this sort of modal dialog lunacy is, sadly, becoming more popular in today's AJAX-y world of web 2.5. Those who can't learn from history are doomed to repeat it, I guess.
Atwood, Jeff. Coding Horror (2009). Articles>Web Design>User Interface>Usability
#35578
This may sound a little harsh, but you'll see, when you do usability tests, that there are quite a few users who simply do not read words that you put on the screen. If you pop up an error box of any sort, they simply will not read it.
Atwood, Jeff. Coding Horror (2004). Articles>User Interface>User Centered Design>Usability
#35655
The Ever-Evolving Arrow: Universal Control Symbol 
The arrow and its brethren are everywhere on our computer screens. For example, a quick examination of the Firefox 3.0 browser, shown in Figure 1 in its standard configuration, yields eight examples of arrows—Forward, Back, and Reload buttons, scroll bar controls, and drop-down menus that reveal search engine, history, and bookmark choices.
Follett, Jonathan. UXmatters (2009). Articles>User Interface>Human Computer Interaction>Graphic Design
