User Interface Design part 2 Pressman chapter 12

User Interface Design – part 2 Pressman, chapter 12 pp 324 -353 Merrill and Feldman, “Rethinking the Path to Usability” IT Pro, May/June 2004 userinter 14 1

Making Meaning u Clarification? u Question? userinter 14 2

Making Meaning u Evaluation – Perspective of author(s) – Author(s) beliefs – Counter-arguments userinter 14 3

Making Meaning u Summarize u What userinter 14 do you believe? 4

Feature Lists “To satisfy target users, many companies spend countless hours and resources developing a feature list, which the design team first carefully codes into software and then uses to build the user interface (UI). This features -first design approach is exactly the reverse of what it should be …” userinter 14 5

Mental Model Users expect the UI to follow their logic, not the software’s. They want the product to serve them. If it doesn’t, they don’t care how good the underlying software is, and the product will not be a commercial success. userinter 14 6

The right questions We believe four questions are key to obtaining insights into potential users. • Who is this user? What are the user’s job responsibilities, career goals, technical background, work environment, and daily job pressures? • What tasks does this user perform now? Which tasks are most important, most difficult, and most common? • Why does this user need a product like ours? What are the user’s current problems, most difficult problems, and anticipated future problems or challenges? • How does the user’s current software fail him or her? What are the user’s current tools, tool limitations, and reasons for difficulty of use? 7 userinter 14

Structuring the UI We begin where the persona will begin when he or she starts our prospective software product. What will the persona want to see first? What will the persona want to do first? We answer these questions by referring to the persona description. Then we create a scenario to describe how the persona will encounter and interact with the first objects that appear on the user interface. userinter 14 8

Goal u “When the implementation model and the user’s mental model are coincident, users generally feel comfortable with the software and use it effectively. ” p 331 userinter 14 9

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SLC userinter 14 11

Gestalt u Something that we perceive as a unit or object u Law of proximity: pieces that are close are perceived to be together u Law of closure: the area inside a closed line are perceived to be an object u Law of good continuation: pieces on a smooth line are perceived as belonging together userinter 14 12

Possible Questions u u u Persona? Does this webpage match persona? Task? Does this webpage match persona’s mental model? Was webpage easy? Was task easy? # of clicks to accomplish task? Memory load? Left-to-right; top-down Back-tracking required? Gestalt? userinter 14 13

Review and complete survey before Tuesday, 10: 00 am u 1’s do #1, 5, 9, 13, 17, 21 u 2’s do #2, 6, 10, 14, 18, 22 u 3’s do #3, 7, 11, 15, 19, 23 u 4’s do #4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24 userinter 14 14