Interface Design

1. Interface Design Natural Design

2. What is natural design? • Intuitive • Considers our learned behaviors • Naturally designed products are easy to interpret and understand.

3. What is unnatural design? • Confusing • Non-intuitive

4. Natural design in everyday life • Hot/cold • Push/pull doors

5. Why do products end up this way (non-intuitive)? • No user testing • Form over function

6. Naturally Designed Interactive Media • What does the underlined text mean? • Where is the menu bar normally placed? • What does a flashing button mean?

7. Form over function • Look of object is more important than how it works. • Dolorian? • Women’s shoes?

8. Limiting the options • A common trait of unnaturally designed objects is that they have too many options. • E.g. Joseph A. Banks • Striking a balance between offering a lot of information and not overwhelming the visitor.

9. What if you can’t limit the options? • www.yahoo.com, www.bbc.com, www.cnn.com • Enormous amount of information. • Categories presented in heirarchy. • Simple color scheme. • Crucial info above the fold.

10. Usability • Interactive products that are intuitive and easy to use have a lot of design effort invested in anticipating, understanding and managing of the users’ expectations.

11. To aid usability of an interactive experience: • Remove obstacles. (Let user’s interact with content as directly as possible). • Minimize effort. (Keep related controls together). • Give feedback. • Be explicit - (What is clickable?) • Be flexible - (Let the user skip features). • Be forgiving - Don’t assume users will do the right thing. • Take advantage of known conventions.

12. When can one break the rules? • Does your target audience have certain knowledge? • Innovative navigation can help solve access problems. (Interface design would never evolve if nothing new is tried). • Always test usability.

13. Usability Testing • Answers the question: Is a technology easy for the user to utilize? • Executed on all types of products. • Goal: identify and fix as many problems as possible • Always on software, becoming more popular on for interactive CDs and web sites.

14. Who should do the usability test? • Experts - can comment on problems that violate usability guidelines. • Users - representative of people who will use product.

15. Expert reviews of usability • Heuristic Evaluation - checks a web site to see if it violates any rules contained in a short set of design heurisitics. • Guidelines Review – a much more thorough evaluation that is more technical – might be able to be automated. One guideline might be checking the use of Alt tags. • Cognitive Walkthrough – Experts go through a series of tasks the user would perform. • Consistency Inspection – expert reviews all the web pages on the web site to ensure that the layout, terminology, and color are the same. • Formal Usability Inspection – designers justify and defend their design choices to expert reviewers, screen by screen.

16. User Testing • Select representative users – e.g. if the site is for doctors, don’t have college students participate in your study • How to recruit – pay them or find someone who is enthusiastic about it and will do it for free. • Select the setting – • Usability lab – set up with computers and, a camera and recording device, and one- way mirror • Workplace testing • Bring “lab in a bag” • Web-based usability testing

17. User testing - various types • Performance measurement – a quantitative measurement based on a list of tasks the user is to perform –that the user was able to perform correctly • Thinking Aloud – users are encourage to verbalize, out loud, their thoughts as they attempt to complete the set of tasks • Coaching Method – user is assisted by the evaluator, but the user can also ask questions of the product that the evaluator can record. • Questionaires – not only asking the users to complete the tasks – but then asking them for feedback on what it was like.