Managing UI Complexity Posted: August 10th, 2009 | Author: Brandon Walkin | Filed under: Design | Comments Off Interface complexity is an issue every designer wrestles with when designing a reasonably sophisticated application. A complex interface can reduce user effectiveness, increase the learning curve of the application, and cause users to feel intimidated and overwhelmed. I’ve spent the past year redesigning a particularly complex application with my primary focus being on reducing complexity. Progressive Disclosure Progressive disclosure is the most popular means of managing complexity. Quite a bit of care needs to be put into the progressive disclosure hierarchy and the mechanisms used for disclosure. There are inconsistent ways of accessing common functionality. Contextual Actions This is a form of progressive disclosure where contextually appropriate controls are exposed on a particular object. Alignment & Visual Hierarchy Visual Noise & Contrast Use of Icons This is a difficult problem to solve.
Complete Beginner's Guide to Design Research In an industry devoted to the people who use our products, services, and applications, research is paramount. We ask questions. We take notes. We learn everything we can about the target audience, and then iteratively test our work throughout the design process. Want UX Tips Delivered Straight to Your Inbox? Original UX articles Curated Resources Never miss an issue! UX research—or as it’s sometimes called, design research—serves many purposes throughout the design process. In this Complete Beginner’s Guide, we’ll look at the many elements of design research, from interviews and observations, to usability testing and A/B testing. What is UX research? UX research encompasses a variety of investigative methods used to add context and insight to the design process. The main goal of design research is to inform the design process from the perspective of the end user. With that in mind, research has two parts: gathering data, and synthesizing that data in order to improve usability. Observation
Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design Interaction Design Pattern Library Suggest a pattern Have you seen new examples of patterns out there that have not been described on this site? Send me a link to an example and I'll add it to my to-do list. Latest comments Form (Lucas Gwadana) Sometimes the ERROR handling is not explicit enough because when a user makes an... Map Navigator (Marcus) For print pages etc static maps are still relevant. Accordion (dellmre) Ajax accordion samples with source code Autocomplete (Zorg) I believe the name of this pattern to be misleading. Slideshow (Joshua) Slideshows on Homepages can be very beneficial. Trends in interactive design 2013 Dr. Dobb's Web Site Brewing a Better Rating System Brewing a Better Rating System Hey there tea drinkers, we just rolled out some updates to Steepster! For one, you can now specify things like steep times and temperatures in your tasting notes. Another highly requested change is a finer rating system, something we’ve been trying to figure out for a while. We think we’ve come up with a pretty neat solution and wanted to walk through some of the decisions we made. The Old System When we first launched Steepster, we weren’t totally sure how people were going to use it. “How long would the typical post be?”" We wanted to wait until we got a better sense of the direction the site before committing to anything too specific. This worked okay for a while, but when we ran the numbers, we saw that ninety-some percent of the teas were getting positive ratings. 5-Star Ratings They’re easy to understand and they’re everywhere. It turns out that the average rating for products on sites with 5-star scales is around 4.3. 100-Point Ratings Letting it Slide
Flatland I have nothing but the utmost respect for Bruce Tognazzini. His work on the Mac was groundbreaking, and Tog on Interface provides fascinating insights into the kinds of problems people had to solve at the dawn of the graphical user interface era. However, I can’t agree with his recent essays in which he talks about Apple’s modern UI design. Essentially, he thinks that Apple’s software has become too simple. In February of this year, he wrote Apple’s Flatland Aesthetic, Part 1: The Mac . 20 years ago, there was a simple application on the Mac for doing basic edits on photos. The solution, according to Tog, is to have «scaleable» user interfaces that work for beginners as well as experts. In some case, you can design a single object that scales from the simple case to the highly complex. The opposite of this is what Tog calls «Flatland»: The Dock, Safari and iPhoto all either default to flat lists of elements, or don’t provide hierarchical structure at all. His first proposed solution?
A User Interface Definition Language in Common Lisp Wednesday, February 13, 2008 Introduction I like HTML in the same way I like PDF - as a document serialization format that does a reasonable job and that I never want to modify by hand. This is one of the main reasons I started Weblocks framework - I never wanted to write a line of HTML again. Ironically, I ended up writing a lot of HTML and learning more about its quirks, accessibility issues, and CSS hooks than I ever wanted to, but I finally ended up with a high level user interface definition language embedded into Common Lisp. Defining a User Interface So how does it work? (defview employee-form (:type form :default-method :post) first-name (last-name :requiredp t :label "Family Name") (contract :present-as (radio :choices '(:full-time :part-time :consultant :intern)) :parse-as keyword) (age :present-as (input :max-length 3) :parse-as integer)) Rendering the object into HTML is then as simple as typing the following line: (render-object-view some-employee 'employee-form) Inheritance
12 Standard Screen Patterns 2010 Update- 15 patterns and 80 new examples By Theresa Neil As Bill mentioned in an earlier post, we don’t want to limit this blog to just the principles and patterns found in the book. For that you can check out our Explore the Book section. In the spirit of that, I want to share an additional set of principles and patterns I have been using for RIA design. While the book takes a much more consumer web site orientation, these concepts are central to enterprise application and web productivity application design and more broad than those discussed in the book. This is the first article in a three part series. With more companies turning to RIA frameworks for enterprise software development, these screen patterns are indispensable for product managers, UX designers, information architects, interaction designers and developers. 01. Master/Detail screen pattern can be vertical or horizontal. 02. The Browse screen pattern can be vertical or horizontal. 03. 04. 05. 06. 07. 08. 09. 10. 11. 12.