Introducing Overlay Scrollbars in Unity « Canonical Design. One of our goals in the Unity design effort is maximising immersion in content, and reducing the amount of chrome and clutter needed around that content. Unity’s new Overlay Scrollbars are a small but important detail in this bigger picture. Problem Today’s scrollbars are optimized for cursor driven UI but they became easily unnecessary and bulky on touchable and small screen devices. In those cases, optimization of the screen’s real-estate becomes essential.
Our interest is in bringing a more lightweight approach to window chrome, like scrollbars, to the desktop experience. Process Research There have been few attempts in the past to bring innovation in this very mature GUI widget. Prerequisites After having a better idea on the problem, and the various attempts, it was time to take some decisions starting from the scope for the solution. The prerequisites we defined were: One of the contexts we used to validate our solution was scrollable panes rich applications like Eclipse: Prioritization. Nielsen Norman Group: usability consulting, training & user research reports. Useit.com: Jakob Nielsen on Usability and Web Design.
Home Page Design Guidelines (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox) Summary: A company's homepage is its face to the world and the starting point for most user visits. Improving your homepage multiplies the entire website's business value, so following key guidelines for homepage usability is well worth the investment. Homepages are the most valuable real estate in the world.
Each year, companies and individuals funnel millions of dollars through a space that's not even a square foot in size. For good reason. A homepage's impact on a company's bottom line is far greater than simple measures of e-commerce revenues: The homepage is your company's face to the world.
The homepage is the most important page on most websites, and gets more page views than any other page. Following are ten things you can do to increase the usability of your homepage and thus enhance your website's business value. Make the Site's Purpose Clear: Explain Who You Are and What You Do 1. 2. Begin the TITLE tag with the company name, followed by a brief description of the site. 113 Design Guidelines for Homepage Usability (Nielsen Norman Group)
While many of these guidelines can apply to web design in general, they are especially critical to follow when designing your homepage, because the stakes are so high. Your homepage is often your first — and possibly your last — chance to attract and retain each customer, rather like the front page of a newspaper.
One of the biggest values of a newspaper's front page is the priority given to top news items. All homepages would benefit from being treated like a front page of a major newspaper, with editors who determine the high-priority content and ensure continuity and style consistency. About These Guidelines Even small changes to homepages can have drastic effects. Consider the homepage for The New York Times. While we encourage you to use these guidelines as a checklist when designing your homepage, recognize that they are written in an abbreviated manner here.
All said, these are just guidelines, not axioms. What's Not in These Guidelines Determining Homepage Content Accessibility URLs. Shneiderman's Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design. Shneiderman's "Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design" These rules were obtained from the text Designing the User Interface by Ben Shneiderman.
Shneiderman proposed this collection of principles that are derived heuristically from experience and applicable in most interactive systems after being properly refined, extended, and interpreted [9]. To improve the usability of an application it is important to have a well designed interface. Shneiderman's "Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design" are a guide to good interaction design. 1 Strive for consistency. 2 Enable frequent users to use shortcuts. 3 Offer informative feedback. 4 Design dialog to yield closure. 5 Offer simple error handling. 6 Permit easy reversal of actions. 7 Support internal locus of control. 8 Reduce short-term memory load. From. DUB - Projects.