#30022
Design Study 2: Structured Selection with a Multi-Modal Extended Selection List 
The design of a special-purpose selection list is reviewed. As part of a performance-support application for classroom teachers, a means was needed for rapid selection from a large number of alternative words. By taking into account the inherent structure of the terms in the list, instead of treating it as a simple list of unspecified objects, a more efficient and more easily used design was achieved. By incorporating the structure of the alternatives, the design was also able to reflect and support best practices in classroom lesson planning.
Constantine, Larry L. and Lucy A.D. Lockwood. Constantine and Lockwood (2001). Design>User Interface>Usability
#21648
Designing a Telephone-Based User Interface
Explains how technical communicators, drawing on their experience designing Web sites and software interfaces, can help design effective interfaces for telephone-answering and call-routing systems.
Hart, Geoffrey J.S. Intercom (2004). Design>User Interface>EPSS>User Centered Design
#23263
Designing Better HTML Authoring Tools
A collection of proposed new tools and features for adding structure to the Web.
Hoffman, Michael. Hypertext Navigation. Articles>Web Design>User Interface>Software
#28680
Designing Breakthrough Products: Going Where No User Has Gone Before
For UX designers, some of the most exciting projects to work on are new-to-the-world or breakthrough products that solve real problems people didn't even realize they had. Get them right and they may be hugely successful in the marketplace, but they're also the riskiest projects. While user-centered design (UCD) techniques can sometimes be valuable on new-product projects, more often, they don't seem to work particularly well when designing breakthrough products. Here are some lessons I've learned from my own work on new-product projects.
Olsen, George. UXmatters (2006). Design>User Interface
#30801
It's not that people resist change whole-scale. They just hate losing control and feeling stupid. When we make critical changes, we risk putting our users in that position. We must take care to ensure that we've considered the process of change as much as we've considered the technology changes themselves. Only then will we end up with changes that our users embrace.
Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering (2005). Design>User Interface>Redesign>Usability
#13830
Whenever we design something, we confront the problem of how to account for differences in our audience's needs, skills, and background. We accept that audiences are diverse and include people with widely varying skill levels, physical abilities, background knowledge, and cultural differences. They range from power users--who could teach us something about the product--to the greenest of neophytes. Some have significant visual or other limitations. Some can understand the most abstract concepts, whereas others wouldn't recognize a metaphor if it bit them. And some come from very different cultures, such as the gap that divides Macintosh and Windows users. Unfortunately, our knowledge of the more obvious differences sometimes leads us to make ridiculous assumptions, such as considering women and men to be different audiences, or believing that it's impossible to produce something that works equally well for experienced and new users.
Hart, Geoffrey J.S. TECHWR-L (2000). Design>User Interface>User Centered Design
#19304
Designing For Touch-Screen Kiosks 
As with other interactive media, touch-screen kiosks are designed for many different types of uses - from art piece installations to bus timetables and just about everything in between. But the practice of design for such kiosks demonstrates the importance of understanding hardware considerations and restraints before embarking on interface development. There are aspects to touch-screen technology that make their design fundamentally different to that of desktop applications. Most of these differences revolve around the nature of the input or controlling device. Touch screen kiosks are controlled directly by the user's finger whereas desktop applications are controlled remotely by devices like a mouse or keyboard. Users' fingers and hands vary in size and shape unlike a mouse cursor that stays more or less the same size from machine to machine. This is the primary consideration for design. For the purposes of this article we will concentrate on the touch-screen and the users' interaction with the content of the kiosk. Issues as to the design and usability of the kiosk's hardware or casing (such as height and location) will not be addressed. Before the designer can begin to think what the user might want in terms of content there are more basic concerns.
Coveney, Rory. Frontend Infocentre (2001). Design>User Interface
#26447
When forms give users the option to continue in two or more alternative directions, such as registering as a new customer or signing in as a returning one, unfortunate users will take the wrong turn if it isn't unmistakably obvious which way they should go. In this article, we'll take a look at a few intersection flows that have caused users problems.
Olsen, Henrik. GUUUI (2005). Articles>User Interface>User Centered Design>Workflow
#24248
Designing Products for the International Environment – a Practical Guide
Most companies are moving quickly beyond their local market to succeed on a large global market. Companies are developing mass market products instead of products for a single customer. All this poises new challenges to everyone in the company. This panel will address the following.
Vatovec, Bogo, Carol Peterson, James V. Romano and Allen Strand. STC Proceedings (1999). Design>User Interface>International
#19288
Scalable interface design ensures that interface development takes account of the need to change over time, providing solutions that are flexible and thus 'future-proof' to some extent. Too often complex interface designs require a complete overhaul when even the smallest change is required in the functionality of the application or site in question. Building 'scalable' interfaces in the first place will save time and cost in the long term - and make coping with upgrades easier for your customers.
Quinn, Anthony. Frontend Infocentre (2001). Design>Web Design>User Interface
#29766
Many web sites and applications include a search feature. Often they provide an extremely simple search interface consisting of a single text box and a "Go" button. Sometimes, however, the users' tasks call for more sophistication, and guidelines for complex search interfaces are difficult to find. This paper details four levels of search interface, and it provides heuristics (guidelines) to use when designing complex search interfaces. Different solutions are appropriate, depending on the users' motivation and knowledge of their subject, experience using search interfaces, and search goals. Finally, PubMed serves as a useful example to illustrate how these guidelines can be used to analyze existing search interfaces.
McDaniel, Scott M. STC Proceedings (2004). Design>Web Design>User Interface>Search
#21488
Designing the Handheld Maritime Communicator
We present the process of designing the first prototype of the Handheld Maritime Communicator: a mobile computer system supporting communication and coordination of safety-critical work activities on large container vessels. Designing the user experience of the Handheld Maritime Communicator was a particular challenge because it targets a highly specialized context of use and because poor design could potentially become a safety hazard. Meeting this challenge, ethnographic field studies on board container vessels were conducted, detailed analyses were carried out, and iterative design was performed. The design produced replaces a large amount of present spoken communication with predefined textual messages on a handheld device. This facilitates persistency, partial automation, and possible integration with other computer-based data. Evaluating the prototype in a high-fidelity ship simulator, prospective users validated the overall design, but also identified a number of usability problems that need to be addressed.
Kjeldskov, Jesper and Jan Stage. AIGA (2003). Design>User Interface>EPSS>Usability
#24427
Designing the Interface for an Electronic Document
Interfaces are more than skin deep. To create a successful electronic documentation project the structure of the information, the navigation and the visual design must all work together. Research Publications' American Journey series of CD-ROMs on topics in American history is a good example of an interface designed from the inside out.
Quesenbery, Whitney. STC Proceedings (1995). Design>User Interface
#10542
In the discussion of interface components we sometimes found it difficult to keep logical interface components separate from toolkit interface components. For example, a label is a logical interface component that describes another component. However, a label is also a toolkit interface component that is used to display non-interactive text and graphics. As such, a label may by used for other functions besides describing other components. For example, a label may be used to create a section header or to display some icons. Wherever possible, we tried to make the distinction between logical and toolkit interface component explicit.
HCIRN (2001). Design>User Interface
#18968
Developing an effective framework for a large collection of linked documents involves: creating an efficient hierarchy of information; mapping task flows through the information hierarchy; determining the best depth for the information space; and creating nodes of appropriate length. These four tasks should be undertaken in order. Each one depends on the outcomes of preceding tasks. Because these elements are interdependent, however, several good solutions to the first two should be developed so that problems with site depth and node length can be addressed.
Kaplan, Nancy and Meg Heisse. University of Baltimore (1998). Design>Web Design>User Interface
#20971
prompting them only when they must make a decision. A wizard involves a structured series of dialogues that applies users’ responses to produce a result, such as installing software or writing a business letter. It is different from a tutorial and other online information in that it helps users accomplish a task, not teaches them how to do it. A wizard is a performance support tool; that is, it supports users as they perform a task. Because the system performs some of the work, it can seemingly bring a user to a higher performance level in less time than conventional training methods. But the cost can be a dumbing down of tasks. Users perform tasks without understanding them and aren’t aware of the underlying decisions. As a result, users may not be able to perform tasks if the system is down. You should use a wizard to build performance only when people can perform a task without knowing all of the steps.
Carliner, Saul. Saul Carliner Studio (2003). Design>User Interface>Wizards
#28496
Selections of 'least favorite' designs from graduate students of the George Mason University Department of Psychology.
Mintz, Farilee. Usability Interface (2006). Design>User Interface>Human Computer Interaction>User Centered Design
#29964
Develop an Ajax-Based File Upload Portlet Using DWR
File upload is a basic function of today's Web portals. In this article, authors Xiaobo Yang and Rob Allan describe how to develop an Ajax-based file upload JSR 168-compliant portlet using DWR (Direct Web Remoting). DWR is an ideal Ajax framework for Java developers that dynamically generates JavaScript based on server-side deployed Java classes. You will learn how you can use DWR to retrieve file upload progress from the portal server.
Yang, Xiabo and Robert Allan. IBM (2007). Articles>Web Design>User Interface>Ajax
#28692
During my years as an interface designer, I've worked with lots of different development teams. From big companies to small startups, the interactions between me--the product designer--and developers have been pretty consistent. We work through what interactions and features are possible given our timeframe and resources. We discuss edge cases and clarify how specific interactions should work. We debate product strategy, information architecture, target audience, front-end technologies, and more. We also frequently encounter the same issue: the need to consider what's not there.
Wroblewski, Luke. UXmatters (2006). Design>User Interface
#30033
Developing User Interface Guidelines for DVD Menus
Watching DVDs can be a frustrating experience, because DVD menus often miss out on usability and are complex and difficult to navigate through. Similar to the early years of web development, there is a lack of design standards. In this paper, we show the development of user interface guidelines for DVD menus. These guidelines can be used to design and evaluate DVD menus. We built a prototype according to the guidelines, conducted usability tests with the prototype and evaluated other movie DVDs using the guidelines to show the applicability, utility and usability of the guidelines.
Kappel, Karin, Martin Tomitsch, Thomas Koltringer and Thomas Grechenig. Proceedings of ACM CHI 2006 (2006). Design>User Interface>Multimedia>DVD
#26420
Developing Voice Interfaces for Legacy Web Applications
Traditionally, web applications are accessed via a single mode interface; information is presented and captured with text. However, one can additionally use a voice browser to navigate the Internet. One can navigate or access 'hands free' Internet applications from anywhere; you are not restricted to the desktop or a portable computer. VoiceXML is a language for Internet telephony applications and is based on the XML language. VoiceXML can 'speech-enable' an existing web application to be used through a conversational interface, providing a more natural way of interaction between users and Internet applications.
Quiané, Jorge and Jorge Manjarrez. ACM Crossroads (2003). Design>Web Design>User Interface>Audio
#26414
The Development of a Game Playing Framework Using Interface-Based Programming
The Java programming language contains object-oriented features enabling the construction of interface-based application frameworks. Interfaces separate module implementation from core implementation, thus simplifying module development. The following article demonstrates how to take advantage of Java interfaces by designing and implementing a game playing application framework.
Cohen, Mark A. ACM Crossroads (2004). Design>User Interface>Programming>Games
#21460
Normally I would write a traditional conference overview to inform people about the recent Designing for User Experiences conference (DUX) held in San Francisco, June 6-8. Instead, I would like to impart a few of the impressions I came away with and recommend that everyone go to the AIGA Case Study Archive to read the papers that were accepted.
Malone, Erin. Boxes and Arrows (2003). Articles>Information Design>User Interface
#30862
DVD Menu Design: The Failures of Web Design Recreated Yet Again
Designers of DVDs have failed to profit from the lessons of previous media: Computer software, Internet web pages, and even WAP phones. As a result, the DVD menu structure is getting more and more baroque, less and less usable, less pleasurable, less effective. It is time to take DVD design as seriously as we do web design. The field needs some discipline some attention to the User Experience, and some standardization of control and display formats.
Norman, Donald A. Alertbox (2001). Design>User Interface>Multimedia>DVD
#23323
Dynamically Conjuring Drop-Down Navigation
Got content? Got pages and pages of content? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could offer your readers a drop-down menu providing instant access to any page, without having to sit down and program the darned thing? By marrying a seemingly forgotten XHTML element to simple, drop-in JavaScript, Christian Heilmann shows how to do just that. There’s even a PHP backup for those whose browsers lack access to JavaScript. Turn on, tune in, drop-down.
Heilmann, Christian. List Apart, A (2004). Design>Web Design>User Interface>DHTML
