Empirical Evaluation of a Popular Cellular Phone's Menu System: Theory Meets Practice    

A usability assessment entailing a paper prototype was conducted to examine menu selection theories on a small screen device by determining the effectiveness, efficiency, and user satisfaction of a popular cellular phone's menu system. Outcomes of this study suggest that users prefer a less extensive menu structure on a small screen device. The investigation also covered factors of category classification and item labeling influencing user performance in menu selection. Research findings suggest that proper modifications in these areas could significantly enhance the system's usability and demonstrate the validity of paper-prototyping which is capable of detecting significant differences in usability measures among various model designs.

Huang, Sheng-Cheng, I-Fan Chou and Randolph G. Bias. Journal of Usability Studies (2006). Articles>User Interface>Usability>User Centered Design

An Empirical Study Comparing Denim and Visio

An ethnographic observation and controlled experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of Denim and MS Visio in terms of supporting user creativity.

Zhao, Haixia. University of Maryland (2002). Articles>User Interface>Software>Visio

Engineers Make Obvious Design Mistakes

The engineers who build the products people use every day are not experts in user behaviour, and they frequently make mistakes that cause lost time and immeasurable frustration. Interaction designers could improve thousands upon thousands of products, leaving engineers to deal with the areas of their interest and experience.

Baker, Adam. Merges.net (2001). Design>User Interface>Engineering>User Centered Design

Ensuring Accessibility for People With Color-Deficient Vision

If you do not consider the needs of people with color-deficient vision when choosing color schemes for applications and Web pages, those you create may be difficult to use or even indecipherable for about one in twelve users.

Gabriel-Petit, Pabini. UXmatters (2007). Design>User Interface>Accessibility>Color

EPSScentral

The EPSScentral Knowledge Network is a collection of resources for developing and evaluating performance centered systems.

EPSScentral. Resources>User Interface>EPSS

EPSScentral: Trends in Interface Design

Articles about emerging trends in computer interface design that may affect the design and development to electronic performance support systems.

EPSScentral. Resources>Directories>User Interface

Ergonomic Mice: Comparison of Performance and Perceived Exertion

This study reports a psychophysical comparison of four ergonomic mouse-type devices to the standard mouse. It was hypothesized that muscle activity transferred from the distal to proximal limbs for some of the ergonomic mice may result in increased load on the shoulders and declines in target acquisition performance. Results revealed a potential tradeoff between performance and safety with the devices as participants performed the best with the standard mouse but reported more wrist exertion with this device.

Scarlett, Deborah. Usability News (2005). Articles>Human Computer Interaction>User Interface>Usability

Ergonomics

Ergonomics commonly refers to designing work environments for maximizing safety and efficiency.

Usernomics. Resources>User Interface>Ergonomics

Essential Use Cases and Responsibility in Object-Oriented Development  

Essential use cases are abstract, lightweight, technology-free dialogues of user intentions and system responsibilities that effectively capture requirements for user interface design. Employing essential use cases in typical object-oriented development processes requires designers to translate them into conventional use cases, costing time, imposing rework, and delaying work on the object-oriented development until the user interface design is complete. We describe how essential use cases can drive object-oriented development directly, without any intervening translation, allowing user interface development to proceed in parallel. Working with essential use cases yields some unexpected further benefits: analysts can take advantage of recurring patterns in essential use cases, and the crucial common vocabulary of responsibilities lets designers trace directly from the essential use cases to the objects in their design.

Biddle, Robert, James Noble and Ewan Tempero. Constantine and Lockwood (2001). Articles>User Interface>Methods

Evolving User Interface Standards

Every software development team either hires a UI specialist or consults an expert to design the next best killer application. As more and more users log onto the net, user base tends to grow and new technologies evolve, web developers and designers are left with very little time to cope up with new techniques in user interface. Thus a new wave of User Interface issues has occurred in the software development life cycle.

Sarjapur, Harsha. uiGarden (2006). Design>User Interface>Standards

Executive Dashboards

Contrary to first impression, an 'executive dashboard' is not found in a CIO’s car. Rather, an executive dashboard, also known as a manager dashboard, executive cockpit, or digital cockpit, is a child of what in the 1980s was referred to as the Executive Information System (EIS).

Kirtland, Alex. Boxes and Arrows (2003). Articles>Management>User Interface>EPSS

The Explorer Bar: Unifying and Improving Web Navigation  

The Explorer bar is a component of the Internet Explorer web browser that provides a unified model for web navigation activities. The user tasks of searching for new sites, visiting favorite sites, and accessing previously viewed sites are simplified and enhanced by using a single user interface element.

Berkun, Scott. ScottBerkun.com (2005). Design>Web Design>User Interface

Exploring Types and Characteristics of Product Forms  

Incorporating emotional value into products has become an essential strategy for increasing a product's competitive edge in the consumer market. It is therefore important for product manufacturers to understand how products affect consumers' emotions. This study was undertaken to investigate the types and characteristics of household products that elicit pleasurable responses, in particular among young, college-age consumers. The results of the study could suggest the types and characteristics to consider when developing pleasurable products aimed at young consumers.

Chang, Wen-chih and Tyan-Yu Wu. International Journal of Design (2007). Design>User Interface>User Experience>Emotions

Extending UML for User Interface

This paper seeks to set out my current position and opinion on how the Unified Modeling Language might be extended to accommodate the modeling of interaction design and user interface design for the purpose of facilitating a user centered design process. I will be presenting proposals for two distinct levels of abstraction in the development of a user interface design. For the higher level, the Interaction Design, I will seek to layout a laundry list of attributes that would be required by a good modeling language for Interaction Design.

Anderson, David J. UIdesign (2000). Design>User Interface>UML

Extensible User Interface Language (XUL)

XUL is an XML-based language for describing the contents of windows and dialogs. XUL has language constructs for all of the typical dialog controls, as well as for widgets like toolbars, trees, progress bars, and menus. Where HTML describes the contents of a single document, XUL describes the contents of an entire window (which could itself contain multiple HTML documents).

Cover Pages (2003). Design>User Interface>XML

Facilitating Data Exploration with Query Previews: A Study of User Performance and Preference

Current networked and local data exploration systems that use command languages (e.g. SQL), menus, or form fillin interfaces do not give users an indication of the distribution of data in their databases. This often leads users to waste time, posing queries that have zero-hit or mega-hit results. Query previews are a novel visual approach for browsing and querying networked or local databases. Query previews supply users with data distribution information for selected attributes of a database, and give continuous feedback about the size of the result set as the query is being formed. Subsequent refinements might be necessary to narrow the search sufficiently. Because there is a risk that query previews are an additional step, leading to a more complex and slow search process, we ran a within subjects empirical study with 12 subjects who used interfaces with and without query previews and with no network delays. Even with this small number of subjects and minimized network delays we found statistically significant differences showing that query previews could speed up performance 1.6 to 2.1 times and lead to higher subjective satisfaction.

Tanin, Egemen, Amnon Lotem, Ihab Haddadin, Ben Shneiderman, Catherine Plaisant and Laura Slaughter. SHORE (1999). Design>User Interface>Usability>Search

Fast-Track User-Centered Design Techniques

The problem: we are being asked to do more UCD work, faster, and with smaller staffs. Sound familiar? Thirteen practitioners met in Asheville, N.C. at UPA 2000 to examine the questions of how we can reduce time and costs and still achieve good results. They developed many practical tips and considerations.

Bugental, J.O. 'Joe' and Kristin Travis. Usability Professionals Association (2001). Design>User Interface>User Centered Design

Faucet Facets: Few Best Practices for Designing Multifaceted Navigation Systems

So often we assume that Web sites should be hierarchically organized. We talk about a 'home page' that offers 'top-level navigation' so that users can 'drill down' to the content. It's as if we're programmed to think top down. But what about information that isn't as easily structured this way? Sometimes, content has many attributes that have different importance to different users. A hierarchy assumes everyone approaches these attributes the same way, but that's often not the case.

Veen, Jeffrey. Adaptive Path (2002). Design>Web Design>User Interface

Fitts's User Interface Law Applied to the Web

Interface design is difficult in part because everything requires interpretation. A design that works for one task or one user might not be appropriate for another. In other types of engineering, like architecture or bridge building, designers can always rely on laws of physics and gravity to make designs work. There is at least one immutable rule for interface design that we know about, and it's called Fitts's Law. It can be applied to software interfaces as well as Web site design because it involves the way people interact with mouse or other pointing devices. Most GUI platforms have built-in common controls designed with Fitts's Law in mind. Many Web designers, however, have yet to recognize the powerful little facts that make this concept so useful.

Berkun, Scott. UIWeb (2000). Design>User Interface>Human Computer Interaction>Web Design

Five Survival Techniques for Creating Usable Products

When we ask designers what stage they spend the bulk of their time in when launching a product, the majority of designers answer, the Implementation Stage. However, our research shows that the teams launching the most usable products on schedule and on budget spend the bulk of their time in the Measure and Learn stage.

Perfetti, Christine. User Interface Engineering (2007). Design>Usability>User Interface>Methods

Flamenco

Flamenco es un proyecto de interfaz de usuario sumamente versátil que combina la búsqueda directa en la base de datos con la navegación siguiendo enlaces organizados en una jerarquía de metadatos (datos sobre los datos) y la previsualización de resultados relacionados.

Dursteler, Juan Carlos. InfoVis (2002). (Spanish) Design>User Interface

Fonts, Image, Interface Layout Solution under High Resolution

For an application to work well under a high resolution display environment, there are four major elements to consider: Text, Fonts, Image (Picture, Icon and Mouse Cursors), and Layout.

Liu, Steven. uiGarden (2006). Articles>User Interface>Human Computer Interaction

Formularios: Identificación de los Campos Opcionales

Completar formularios en los sitios web es uno de los procesos que requiere normalmente mayor esfuerzo por parte del usuario. No disponer de formularios 'usables' puede ser una de las causas de abandono más frecuente de un sitio web. Para conseguir formularios usables se deben tener en cuenta muchos aspectos. Uno de ellos, es diferenciar de forma fácil y clara los campos obligatorios de los opcionales[1]. En este artículo se muestran y valoran lo diferentes métodos que utilizan para ello las webs de banca de particulares españolas. El trabajo de campo realizado ha consistido en revisar los procesos de ejecución de transferencias y de registro de nuevos clientes (si lo hubiera) de los sitios web de los siguientes trece bancos: Patagon, Cajamadrid, Cam, Uno-e, eBankinter, CaixaCatalunya, BancoPopular-e, Santander Central Hispano, BBVA, La Caixa, El Monte, Ing-direct, Banesto.

Nosolousabilidad.com (2002). (Spanish) Design>User Interface>Usability

Foundations of Interaction Design

An interview with David Malouf on his article, Foundations of Interaction Design. We discuss several foundations of Interaction design including time, metaphor, abstraction, and negative space. David also provides greater detail to comments posted on his article from readers from around the world.

Malouf, David Heller and Jeff Parks. Boxes and Arrows (2007). Articles>User Interface>Interaction Design>Podcasts

Four Strategies for Promoting Common UI Guidelines within Adobe  

It can be very challenging to create a consistent cross-product user experience.

Bachman, Bill, Frederick Aliaga, Dave Valiulis and Marissa Treinen. Adobe Magazine (2002). Design>User Interface>Software