Interaction Styles, Guidelines and Standards

1. Interaction Styles, Guidelines and Standards Lynne Hall

2. Interaction Styles • command line • menus • natural language • question/answer and queries • form fills and spreadsheets • WIMP • point and click • 3D interfaces

3. Shneiderman’s 8 golden rules of dialogue design • Strive for consistency • Enable frequent users to use shortcuts • Offer informative feedback • Design dialogs to yield closure • Offer simple error handling • Permit easy reversal of actions • Support internal locus of control • Reduce short-term memory load

4. Direct manipulation • why and how does it work? • visibility • incremental action and rapid feedback • reversability • all actions syntactically correct • actions manipulate visible objects directly • Death of the desktop metaphor? • from Xerox Star to Windows ‘95

5. Principles, guidelines, and standards • Principles • high level and widely applicable • Guidelines • more detailed, maybe in form of rules • in-house and proprietary style guides • Standards • have formal authority

6. Example principles • know the user • reduce cognitive load • design for error • maintain clarity and consistency

7. Using Guidelines • many sets of guidelines • helps to understand the underlying reasoning • basis of ‘heuristic evaluation’ (more later) a collection of guidelines links www.ida.liu.se/~miker/hci/guidelines.html

8. Guideline Example • 2.0/13 + Consistent Wording • For displayed data and labels, choose words carefully and then use them consistently. • Example • (Good) | Record A Change | | Record B Change | | Record C Change | • (Bad) | Update of Record A | | Record B Maintenance | | Change in Record C |

9. Example Continued... • Comment Consistent word usage is particularly important for technical terms. Standard terminology should be defined and documented in a glossary for reference by interface designers as well as by users.

10. Hix and Hartson’s guidelines

11. Hix and Hartson (2)

12. Standards • ISO 9241 • European directive (90/270/EEC)

13. General introduction Guidance on task requirements VDU requirements Keyboard requirements Workstation layout and postural requirements Environmental requirements Display requirements with reflections Requirements for displayed colours Requirements for non-keyboard input devices Dialogue principles Guidance on usability specification and measures Presentation of information User guidance Menu dialogues Command dialogues Direct manipulation dialogues Form-filling dialogues ISO 9241

14. ISO 9241 example

15. European directive of 29.5.90 • minimum health & safety requirements for employees who work with display screens • wide exceptions • employers’ obligations

16. Conclusions • Interaction Styles, Guidelines and Standards provide a basis for design • Industry and international standards • Reduce need for innovation • Maximise memorability and ease transfer of skills