Uses for Virtual Reality in the Workplace and Classroom  

Virtual reality and game technology can be used in the technical communication classrooms and the workplace as well as the laboratory. Because our communication into the 21st century will take many "technical" forms, the technology, creativity, degree of interaction, and multimedia designs of virtual reality simulations should become part of our communication technology in the 1990s. Although hypertext, hypermedia, computer-aided design (CAD), and multimedia, multisensory training applications are becoming more common in the workplace, the concept of virtual reality has seldom been translated into practical applications that require business and technical communicators to have special skills. As well, advances in holographic information create exciting new educational designs for the future.

Porter, Lynnette R. STC Proceedings (1993). Articles>TC>User Interface>3D

Using Machine Learning to Populate Dynamic Interfaces  

How can we bring machine learning techniques to bear on the problem of enabling dynamic search interfaces for complex document collections?

Efron, Miles. IAsummit (2004). Design>Web Design>User Interface

UXmatters

A forum for the discussion of progressive ideas about important issues relating to user experience.

UXmatters (2006). Journals>User Interface>User Experience

Validating the Out-of-the-Box Experience: A Case Study  

This paper describes how the User Centered Design team investigated customers’ out-of-the-box needs and validated the design of the out-of-the-box elements described in the previous paper “Designing the OOBE: A Case Study” by Lee Anne Kowalski in these Proceedings.

Kopp, Eileen F. STC Proceedings (2001). Presentations>User Interface>Usability

Visio: The Interaction Designer's Nail Gun

How to use Visio for rapid prototyping - now with scrolling pages and sketchy interface widgets.

Olsen, Henrik. Guuui (2008). Articles>User Interface>Software>Visio

Visualización Ambiental

La visualización ambiental de información consiste en la recepción de información proveniente de objetos de nuestro entorno que cambian sus propiedades, color, olor, presión táctil, en función del estado de la información que monitorizan. Se abre un campo potencialmente importante para ellos.

Dursteler, Juan Carlos. InfoVis (2003). (Spanish) Design>User Interface>Ambient

Visualización Espacialmente Consciente

Las pantallas de los ordenadores son como una ventana al ciberespacio, a menudo demasiado pequeñas y limitadas. Los dispositivos capaces de localizarse en el espacio personal del usuario ofrecen una ventana a espacios virtuales 3D en el que la combinación de movimiento e interacción abre nuevas posibilidades de visualización.

Dursteler, Juan Carlos. InfoVis (2003). (Spanish) Design>User Interface>Operating Systems>PDA

Voting and Usability Project Update

It's been two-and-a-half years since we started the Voting and Usability Project. This project started as we all realized with some horror that usability problems in our voting systems could affect the results of an election--effectively disenfranching some voters through the design of the ballot, as Susan King Roth put it in the report on her research. Since then, our interest has expanded into a more general interest in the usability of voting systems and usability professionals can help make voting systems more usable for everyone.

Quesenbery, Whitney. Usability Professionals Association (2003). Articles>Usability>User Interface>Civic

Waking Up to Good Design

Why an awareness of good design has increased at such a dramatic rate in recent months.

Zambito, Tony. Cooper Interaction Design (2001). Design>User Interface>Assessment

The Way Of User Interface Design  

Good user interface design requires a marriage of technical communication, human factors, graphic design, and cognitive psychology. A good user interface designer (or visual designer) is a combination of writer and artist, therapist and engineer. But, one of the central skills in this fields is communication. The user interface is communication—it is the primary link between the person using the product and the actual code making the screens move and respond.

Towey, Ingrid K. STC Proceedings (1994). Presentations>User Interface>TC

We Are All Designers  

We are all designers -- because we must be. We live our lives, encounter success and failure, sadness and joy. We structure own worlds to support ourselves throughout life.

Norman, Donald A. JND.org (2003). Design>User Interface>Usability

Web 2.0 Can Be Dangerous

AJAX, rich Internet UIs, mashups, communities, and user-generated content often add more complexity than they're worth. They also divert design resources and prove (once again) that what's hyped is rarely what's most profitable.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2007). Articles>Web Design>User Interface>Ajax

Web Interface Design: Learning from our Past

The advent of World Wide Web authoring has led to a plethora of graphics rich web pages. But where's the beef? In addition to placing marketing information on a company's home page the strength of the web lies in its flexibility to link to corporate databases and processes running on a variety of machines, both web and non-web servers. Tasks such as, creating transaction systems for commerce, creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for legacy systems, and doing queries against corporate databases require the web designer to take into account more than HTML code and imagemaps. The heritage of interactive design for network-based solutions has helped interface designers understand how to apply their craft to create effective World Wide Web solutions.

Miller, Richard H. Rutgers University. Design>Web Design>User Interface

Well-Designed Products

To offset this sometimes irritating tendency to critique and redesign everything we see, I'd like to offer a selection of software that I consider to be truly well-designed. To avoid creating a list that is simply an expression of my personal taste (which of course it is, to some extent), I devised some criteria as necessary aspects of a well-designed software product.

Cronin, Dave. Cooper Interaction Design (2004). Design>Usability>User Interface

What Causes Usability Problems

With so much good advice available, and the need for user input being so much a matter of common sense, it seems fair to ask why usability issues are so common amongst websites and applications - even those which have invested significant resources in development. What is it that drives otherwise sensible organisations and businesses to build products and services that are counter-intuitive and actively annoying for many users? The answers to these questions are revealing, in the sense that they illustrate how easily usability can be subverted by alternative agendas. And they highlight the need for a user champion within the organisation, an individual outside any internal interest groups, and potentially the company itself, who acts as a corrective to the forces that can leave usability on the back burner. This list is not one of objections (no time, no money, etc.), most of which are spurious, but rather of explanations for apparently baffling decisions that are often taken without even thinking about the consequences.

Farrell, Tom. Frontend Infocentre (2000). Articles>Usability>User Interface

What We Can Learn from Microsoft Mojave

A pretty interface doesn’t make an application or website. Even the early releases of Microsoft Vista looked amazing. The graphics, interface, and 'look' of the system were much more impressive than XP. But looks alone don’t make the package. It lacked in usability, creating error messages and not having a standard navigation schema. Users didn’t know if they were to click a button, an image, or text to complete their task. It is important to create a standardized and intuitive interface, as well as nice looking, so that users can navigate your site or application.

Robbins, Kyle. ReEncoded (2008). Articles>User Interface>Human Computer Interaction>Microsoft Windows

What's Wrong with (Almost) All Web Sites

The vast majority of web sites commit usability and design violations that make it hard for users to find relevant content and functions. These problems are not difficult to diagnose or remedy. How many of these "user crimes" is your web site guilty of committing?

Streight, Steven. Blogger.com (2004). Articles>Web Design>User Interface>Interaction Design

When Management Becomes Personal: An Activity-Theoretic Analysis of Palm™ Technologies

Palm Technologies, a group of personal digital assistants or PDAs developed in the early 90s, have rapidly embedded themselves into the daily lives of users. The aim of this chapter is to provide an activity theoretic account of PDAs as technologies of text. Three questions are pursued: Out of what cultural history did Palm Technologies emerge? What motivated users to adopt Palm Technologies? How did Palm Technologies become incorporated into the activity patterns of everyday life? The evidence presented suggests that Palm Technologies work by moving systematic management techniques originally developed for organizations into the personal sphere. When systematic management becomes personal, task management separates from the task itself, leading to a fragmentation of motive that may challenge some of the basic assumptions of activity theory. This fragmentation is mediated through the space-time affordances of textualization and concurrent linearization of time. Like the systematic management of organizations before it, such textual affordances may become subject to surveillance and manipulation - by ourselves if not by others. All of this suggests that some interesting issues will arise as PDA technologies attempt to move outside of their managerial base and into the domestic sphere, in effect databasing our lives.

Geisler, Cheryl. WAC Clearinghouse (2002). Design>User Interface>Theory>PDA

Where Am I?

It seems strange to be talking about something as basic as 'navigation' 11 years into the web era. And yet, if you’re a web designer, chances are you’ve made some mistakes in this fundamental area. I know I have. So let’s go back to basics.

Powazek, Derek. List Apart, A (2006). Design>Web Design>User Interface

Why Amazon Succeeds -- And Why It Won't Help You

Amazon is one of the best on-site search capabilities we've ever seen. But surprisingly, the reason why it works so well is likely to be the same reason why Search won't work well on your site.

User Interface Engineering (2002). Design>Web Design>User Interface>Search

Why Are Good User Interfaces So Hard to Make? Three Insights into Good Design

Last year at Internet World a woman asked me why software and Web sites were so hard to use. Let's call her Pandora. I told Pandora that either we aren't smart enough yet, or the industry has not matured to the point at which well-designed products are required for companies to be profitable. She didn't buy it. She swore that sometimes we just did it on purpose. She laughed when she said it, but I think she meant it. It's my job to make simple-to-use products, and I took what she said to heart. I said that we really are trying, and that we're getting better at it all the time. She walked away unimpressed. I went back to the hotel bar that night and thought about why things are the way they are with the Internet and computers.

Berkun, Scott. UIWeb (1999). Design>User Interface>User Centered Design>Web Design

Why Do People Become Attached to Their Products?

How can a designer increase the degree to which people bond with a product? This is the question researcher Ruth Mugge tackled, who has recently received her PhD degree on this topic at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering of Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands.

Mugge, Ruth. uiGarden (2007). Design>User Experience>User Interface

Why Good Design Comes from Bad Design

When I was a computer science/philosophy student at CMU, I took a design project course to learn about all of this interface design stuff I'd heard about. The first day of class I arrived at the studio room, and found a young man at a drawing table, sketching out different variations of the Walkman® he was designing. I got close enough to see the large sketchpad and saw 30 or 40 different variations that he had considered and put down on paper. I introduced myself, pleaded ignorance about design, and asked him why he needed to make so many sketches. He thought for a second, and then said, 'I don't know what a good idea looks like until I've seen the bad ones.' I smiled, but was puzzled. I felt like going back across campus to the computer science labs. If he's a designer, shouldn't he make fewer sketches instead of more? I didn't really understand what he was talking about until many years later.

Berkun, Scott. UIWeb (2000). Design>User Interface

Why is it so Hard to Make Products that People Love?

Why do so many good designs get trampled during the product development process? If everyone is trying to create something good for their customers, why is the development process so rife with disagreements and compromises that actually hurt businesses in the long run? If everyone has the same good intentions, can't the business people just make up their minds about what kind of product they want to create and let design create the right solution?

Adlin, Tamara and John Pruitt. Gain: AIGA Journal of Business and Design (2006). Design>User Interface>Collaboration