UIdesign

Change the Constraint, Change the Guidelines

From a usability perspective are we letting inertia stop us from going and searching for the real new issues which constrain web sites from achieving their goal, or are we moving on, forgetting the last war, and actively out looking for that new constraint and seeking to write the new rules for a world where broadband is ubiquitous?

Lean Interaction Design and Implementation

Lean UI development in Feature Driven Development is achieved through right-first-time implementation of the interaction designer's intent using David Harel's Statechart notation to model the interaction design.

Link Color Déjà Vu

It seems that Jakob Nielsen is back grinding on one of his old organs with the current AlertBox and the tune is 'standard link colors improve usability'. No one can blame Jakob for recycling old material. My goodness, he has been publishing a weekly column for almost 10 years, things are bound to come around again and again.

Reality Check

Many would-be e-businesses, seduced by the lure of the emerging 'virtual-world' on the web, have ignored 40 years of accumulated wisdom in how to design usable information systems, and have seemingly forgotten that a satisfying 'user experience' is key to the successful implementation of any information system.

An Audience With Alan Cooper: Defining Interaction Design

What was intended to be an Interview immediately became an audience with the master. It became difficult to slide in the questions as Cooper began to tear up the rulebook for the technology industry and throw it out. He discusses why Interaction Design is about complete systems architecture and he hits on what's wrong with relational databases; what's wrong with file systems; why Interaction Design is a lot more than Interface Design; and why he really doesn't like Usability much either.

Evangelize with Usability: Using Invalid Users to Sell User Centered Design to a large organization

In larger technology companies it can often be difficult to develop an understanding of the advantages of doing good product design early. As Alan Cooper told us, 'The word 'design' is toxic in the world of business'. More so with Interaction Design and User Centered Design processes which require to be done early, close to the beginning of a project while the product is being defined and the requirements written. It is not unusual to find a number of very skeptical people around, who question, the time, budget and effort which must go into these activities. So how do you overcome this skepticism? How do you sell Interaction Design to a skeptical audience? The answer is to use Usability Testing as your early option for evangelizing your new principles and approach. By carefully selecting a set of 'invalid' test participants, you can sow the seeds for future success. This strategy is not without it's risks and it could easily backfire if your design is not good. This short paper seeks to advise you how to select the candidate evangelists and how to manage the risks of showing them the product early, so that you get the desired result - an influential band of company evangelists to your User Centered Design cause. People who will go forth and spread the word that your efforts, the budget and the time are not only necessary but essential for the future success of the business.

Extending FDD for UI: Implementing Feature Driven Development on Presentation Layer Projects

Feature Driven Development is a model-driven short-iteration process for managing the analysis, design and construction phases of a software project. Feature Driven Development was developed in 1998 by Jeff De Luca following on the back of work by Peter Coad on Feature Lists. I was fortunate to have worked on the team, together with Stephen Palmer, Phil Bradley and Paul Szego, as we developed the FDD method and used it to deliver a very large project. So far the published material on FDD focuses on its use with the business layer piece of the system. Back in 1998 we also adapted the method to accommodate presentation and system interface layers. However, the early implementations for these other layers were never wholely satisfactory. Over the last 2 years I have continued to refine and develop FDD for use with presentation layers. This paper will set out my latest thinking on FDD for UI.

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.

Chessboard Layout Pattern

A multi-screen GUI has become a favourite amongst designers aiming at a wider and less experienced user community. It is widely held that multiple overlapping windows can be confusing and visually cluttered for the novice user. Another common motivation is that a predominantly data intensive business application must provide simple, fast and by implication 'a-modal' navigation across large sections of the problem domain. This is a common requirement when user task analysis and interviews indicate that the user is often interrupted or must frequently switch between incomplete tasks. It is also common to prefer an a-modal design when it is impossible to predict in advance what the user will prefer to view and when. Particularly true of applications for the World Wide Web where the user community can be unknown or undefined and prior research into their needs and preferences has not been done. It is proposed to provide a single (almost) full screen presentation of a single view, whilst allowing the user to quickly navigate to other related data through no more than two mouse clicks / navigation choices or selections.

Site Redesign

After one year of running uidesign.net, I was aware that the original design though functional was looking tired. It was also failing to meet the requirements and expectations of Users and Owner to a sufficient degree. I was also acutely aware that if you are going to preach or teach then you need to lead by example. You have to walk-the-walk as well as talk-the-talk. Actually, the design of the site has remained far from static over the first 12 months. As the quantity of material has grown, the site design has had to grow with it. It became obvious very early that the initial directory structure just wasn't going to cope with the growth of site. The original premise of 'publish a few white papers' had been outgrown. This lack of foresight cost. Many of you still come by the site from Search Engines which have archived those early original links. So the directory structure changed after 3 months. The original navigation space underwent subtle change too, as it became evident where the focus of the site was and the areas that I was able to develop.

Two Tracks to a User-Centered Design Solution

One commonly held objection to developing a superior user experience, is that it takes too long. The argument goes that, if you wait to get it right then you'll be late to market and the opportunity will be lost. The objective isn't to say 'Ready! Aim! Aim! Aim! Aim! Aim!, Fire', but 'Ready! Fire! Now adjust your aim for effect...' In this short white paper, we present an approach which allows you to do both in a controlled and reasoned fashion - move quickly to respond to market demands, whilst developing a superior user experience.

UI Design

A web magazine for interaction designers.