Melbourne Cup Day, UI Design and PDC
It’s now November.
Yup, the 11th month of the year.
The second last month of the year.
And yesterday being the first Tuesday of November, meant us Melburnians got a day off to enjoy the “races”. Well, most of us just pay attention to the main race if nothing at all.
I decided to make the most of the “free day” to download and view a few of the Microsoft PDC 2005 Presentations. I decided to focus my attention on the Presentation area, which covers Avalon (WPF – Windows Presentation Framework… I still prefer Avalon!), ASP.NET, WinForms, Atlas (basically UI related), and where my main interest has been for awhile. I ended up with just over 1GB worth of presentations. Decided it was taking too long, so I’ll download more another day.
I didn’t end up watching much (took awhile to download), spent the time browsing a few blog entries here and there. Catching up on feeds I hadn’t read. Looked at tech.memeorandum a few times.
I only had enough time to go through one complete presentation, which was quite interesting and was presented by Hillel Cooperman (link to his blog) called Getting Users to Fall in Love with Your Software: 2005 Edition (powerpoint slides).
A few good points were brought up that caught my attention and got me thinking about the UI for my app (some just popped into my mind caused by points he brought up during the presentation).
- How easy is it for the user to do common tasks?
- Are there too many pointless dialogs that all look?
- Are there any error messages/dialogs that could be more informative and more user friendly?
- Have you ever watched a user use your app? If so, how easy/difficult was it for them to navigate around the app?
- Remember that, no two users will use your app the same way!
- If the user finds something too difficult to use, they will only use it when they don’t have any other choice!
- Keep the UI simple, and familiar to the user.
There were many other interesting points brought up in the presentation, but many who have read other UI books (etc…) would have heard those or variations on them. But it’s always good to re-iterate the same points if people are still making the same mistakes. Right?
One of my University subjects was called Graphical User Interface Technology, and we had an introduction to what was considered good UI design, and what was considered to be poor UI design. As well as learning about how our memory remembered various items (chunked memory and a few other things), and a humans’ visual perception among other things.
It was an interesting subject, UI Design always is. The book we had to study for the subject was titled “About Face 2.0” authored by Alan Cooper. Although didn’t go through it as thoroughly as I should have at the time, I did go back to visit some of the points from the book and then decided to purchase another one of Alan’s books “The Inmates are Running the Asylum” which was also quite interesting. The other book we used for the subject was “The Design of Everday Things” by Donald A. Norman.
All good books to get you starting to think more about the design of user interfaces, be it computer software, everyday physical objects.
Many of the software created today will be used by many different users, in many different circumstances. All of whom will have different expectations when using your software. One users’ preference is not another users’ preference and vice versa. (As they say, not all humans are created the same.) Users expect familiarity througout using your software. Users hate software that isn’t consistent.
If you have several functions doing similar things, keep it consistant! Perhaps create a UI guideline for your app if you don’t already have one, or adopt one and stick with it. And adjust it as needed, while making sure you stick to it.
There’s a collection of UI Guidelines listed here, which I found after a quick web search. I remember using this one at webstyleguide.com back in uni, which is a nice reference guide for web UI.