Interface Design

Provides information on designing easy-to-use interfaces.

Most programmers' fear of user interface (UI) programming comes from their fear of doing UI design. They think that UI design is like graphic design—the mysterious process by which creative, latte-drinking, all-black-wearing people produce cool-looking, artistic pieces. Most programmers see themselves as analytic, logical thinkers instead—strong at reasoning, weak on artistic judgment, and incapable of doing UI design. In this brilliantly readable book, author Joel Spolsky proposes simple, logical rules that can be applied without any artistic talent to improve any user interface, from traditional GUI applications to websites to consumer electronics. Spolsky's primary axiom, the importance of bringing the program model in line with the user model, is both rational and simple. In a fun and entertaining way, Spolky makes user interface design easy for programmers to grasp. After reading User Interface Design for Programmers, you'll know how to design interfaces with the user in mind. You'll learn the important principles that underlie all good UI design, and you'll learn how to perform usability testing that works.

Technological advances in hardware and software provide powerful tools with the potential to design interfaces that are powerful and easy to use. Yet, the frustrations and convoluted "work-arounds" often encountered make it clear that there is substantial room for improvement. Drawn from more than 60 years of combined experience studying, implementing, and teaching about performance in human-technology systems, Display and Interface Design: Subtle Science, Exact Art provides a theoretically-based yet practical guide for ecological display and interface design. Written from the perspective of cognitive systems engineering and ecological interface design, the book delineates how to design interfaces tailored to specific work demands, leverage the powerful perception-action skills of the human, and use powerful interface technologies wisely. This triadic approach (domain, human, interface) to display and interface design stands in sharp contrast to traditional dyadic (human, interface) approaches. The authors describe general principles and specific strategies at length and include concrete examples and extensive design tutorials that illustrate quite clearly how these principles and strategies can be applied. The coverage spans the entire continuum of interfaces that might need to be developed in today's work places. The reason that good interfaces are few and far between is really quite simple: they are extremely difficult to design and build properly. While there are many books available that address display design, most of them focus on aesthetic principles but lack scientific rigor, or are descriptive but not prescriptive. Whether you are exploring the principles of interface design or designing and implementing interfaces, this book elucidates an overarching framework for design that can be applied to the broad spectrum of existing domains.

"Hackos and Redish wisely offer us the three things we most need about user and task analysis: practical advice, practical advice, and practical advice." -Ben Shneiderman, University of Maryland "This book is well written, thorough, and loaded with techniques, examples, and resources that bring analysis to everyone." -Marcia L. Conner, Director of Usability & Learnability PeopleSoft, Inc. User and Task Analysis for Interface Design helps you design a great user interface by focusing on the most important step in the process -the first one. You learn to go out and observe your users at work, whether they are employees of your company or people in customer organizations. You learn to find out what your users really need, not by asking them what they want, but by going through a process of understanding what they are trying to accomplish. JoAnn Hackos and Janice (Ginny) Redish, internationally known experts in usable design, take you through a step-by-step process to conduct a user and task analysis. You learn: * How interface designers use user and task analysis to build successful interfaces * Why knowledge of users, their tasks, and their environments is critical to successful design * How to prepare and set up your site visits * How to select and train your user and task analysis team * What observations to make, questions to ask, and questions to avoid * How to record and report what you have learned to your development team members * How to turn the information you've gathered into design ideas * How to create paper prototypes of your interface design * How to conduct usability tests with your prototypes to find out if you're on the right track. This book includes many examples of design successes and challenges for products of every kind.

Browsing for information is a significant part of most research activity, but many online collections hamper browsing with interfaces that are variants on a search box. Research shows that rich-prospect interfaces can offer an intuitive and highly flexible alternative environment for information browsing, assisting hypothesis formation and pattern-finding. This unique book offers a clear discussion of this form of interface design, including a theoretical basis for why it is important, and examples of how it can be done. It will be of interest to those working in the fields of library and information science, human-computer interaction, visual communication design, and the digital humanities as well as those interested in new theories and practices for designing web interfaces for library collections, digitized cultural heritage materials, and other types of digital collections.

This book is a comprehensive and authoritative guide to voice user interface (VUI) design. The VUI is perhaps the most critical factor in the success of any automated speech recognition (ASR) system, determining whether the user experience will be satisfying or frustrating, or even whether the customer will remain one. This book describes a practical methodology for creating an effective VUI design. The methodology is scientifically based on principles in linguistics, psychology, and language technology, and is illustrated here by examples drawn from the authors' work at Nuance Communications, the market leader in ASR development and deployment. The book begins with an overview of VUI design issues and a description of the technology. The authors then introduce the major phases of their methodology. They first show how to specify requirements and make high-level design decisions during the definition phase. They next cover, in great detail, the design phase, with clear explanations and demonstrations of each design principle and its real-world applications. Finally, they examine problems unique to VUI design in system development, testing, and tuning. Key principles are illustrated with a running sample application. A companion Web site provides audio clips for each example: www.VUIDesign.org The cover photograph depicts the first ASR system, Radio Rex: a toy dog who sits in his house until the sound of his name calls him out. Produced in 1911, Rex was among the few commercial successes in earlier days of speech recognition. Voice User Interface Design reveals the design principles and practices that produce commercial success in an era when effective ASRs are not toys but competitive necessities.

As technology has rapidly advanced, so too has the way we use and interact with it. Gone are the days of flat black backgrounds dotted with blocky green text; now, users expect a massive range of colors, layouts, and fonts to be used to entertain and assist them in their daily lives. GUI Design assembles the best of recent graphic user interface for a collection that provides practical encouragement for those new to the world as well as inspiration for experienced designers. The book gathers Twitters Vine video creation app for Windows phones, the vulgar-yetamusing Authentic Weather app, an application designed to help tourists follow the physical and ideological path of the Iron Curtain, and more to showcase programs that balance information flow with user experiences and highlight the creativity, inspiration, and expressive techniques used in their design. The projects within demonstrate the increasingly significant role of user interfaces in both design and our everyday lives in the modern world.

Although numerous sources document aspects of user-centered design, there are few references that consider how a designer transforms the information gathered about users and their work into an effective user interface design. This book explains just how designers bridge that gap. A group of leading experts in GUI design describe their methods in the context of specific design projects, and while the projects, processes, and methods vary considerably, the common theme is building a bridge between user requirements and user interface design.