User Interface Forum - All Discussions

New Version up and running

Admin — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 21:53:05 +0100

I have upgraded the forum software to the latest version. Please let me know if you experience any issues.

Many thanks in advance,
Marco

Card sorting

folklore — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 10:09:04 +0100

Card sorting is a cheap, and relatively fast technique to help with categorization. Although not directly relevant to the user interface, it can have a significant impact on your user interface if your categories are poorly defined.

Making things as easy as possible for your users to navigate your website or your software, for that matter, is of utmost importance.

Card sorting is one technique that can help a lot with this. I found this excellent write-up for this.

http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/card_sorting_a_definitive_guide

Hope you find it useful!

Kobus

Is all this necessary? A simple interface design

jnavia — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 08:14:02 +0100

Wedit is a programmer's editor designed under windows 3.0, (approx 1992). It has been through many incarnations, and currently is up and running under windows 64 bit and windows XP.

Through all this years, the user interface has stayed more or less the same. You can see it by downloading lcc-win32, a compiler system where Wedit is used as the Integrated Development Environment (IDE). The URL is:
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~lcc-win32.

When you open Wedit you will be surprised:
o No toolbars, no icons
o A menu, and nothing else.

This is a very spartan user interface, similar to the Google one. You want an editor and the editor tries to show you the maximum of text, nothing else.

I have resisted the more or less general trend to have a toolbar.

Why?

In my opinion, toolbars just take precious screen real estate and give very little in functionality. Mst of the time I disable and hide the toolbarts in other IDEs when possible. The cryptic symbols never tell me anything and in most cases, they are not standard. You have to learn them by heart each one of them, what makes them unusable if you use more than one IDE.

I have concentrated my work in the substantive features of the IDE: goto definition, spelling checker, and other features that aren't found in many other concurrent products.

This doesn't mean of course that the possibilities that a graphical user interface gives the programmer aren't used. There is a window to show the messages of the compiler in the traditional way, that serves too as a window to display the results of a search or to display the information the debugger needs.

Most of the time, the interfaces I see under windows (and under linux) are too charged of unnecessary stuff, incomprehensible icons,and in general

just useless kruft

My 0.02cents

jacob

Designing a Wizard

Marco — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 13:59:18 +0100

Hi everybody,

Currently I need to design a Wizard for an application and now I am looking for any good Wizard design resources. I have found an interesting description of the new Aero Wizard guidelines.

Does anybody know a good resource on designing a Wizard?

Thanks in advance,
Marco

User Interface Design Guidelines

Marco — Sat, 11 Feb 2006 12:07:23 +0100

Interface guidelines describe the look and feel of software user interface. These guidelines determine how a user experience a software product. Below is a list of common design guidelines:

Microsoft: User Interface Design and Development

GNOME Human Interface Guidelines 2.0

KDE User Interface Guidelines

Apple Human Interface Guidelines

Palm

Java Look and Feel Design Guidelines

Windows Vista: Top Guidelines Violations

Marco — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 21:55:09 +0100

This is a nice comprehensive list of Windows Vista Top Guidelines Violations.

Top Guidelines Violations