Quick and Dirty Usability testing tips?
What are your best usability testing tips? I need quick & cheap. ...
hci
HCI: UI beyond the WIMP Paradigm
With the popularity of the Apple iPhone, the potential of the Microsoft Surface, and the sheer fluidity and innovation of the interfaces pioneered by Jeff Han of Perceptive Pixel ... What are good examples of Graphical User Interfaces which have evolved beyond the Windows, Icons, ( Mouse / Menu ), and Pointer paradigm ? ...
Neural Networks or Human-computer interaction
I will be entering my third year of university in my next academic year, once I've finished my placement year as a web developer, and I would like to hear some opinions on the two modules in the Title. I'm interested in both, however I want to pick one that will be relevant to my career and that I can apply to systems I develop. I'm do...
How can I handle multiple mouse inputs in Java?
A friend of mine asked me to implement a blue and a red pointer to represent the inputs of two separate mice to expedite a mixing desk scenario for real time audio mixing. I'd love to, but as much as I think it is a great idea, I don't have a clue as to where to start looking for a possible solution. Where should I start researching a ...
What are some good examples showing that "I am not the user"?
I'm a software developer who has a background in usability engineering. When I studied usability engineering in grad school, one of the professors had a mantra: "You are not the user". The idea was that we need to base UI design on actual user research rather than our own ideas as to how the UI should work. Since then I've seen some goo...
What alternative user input techniques should be adopted in programming?
Programming is particularly different to, for example word processing due to the wealth of special symbols etc that need to be entered. Of the current crop of new user interface techniques, which are suited to programming and why? Or is the idea of a language syntax the problem, should we be programming more symbolically, and if so, ho...
Usability Solutions to Displaying Denormalized Data
I've got a typical impedance mismatch where the data is stored in a normalized fashion: Client | Year | Value -------------------------- Foo 2007 9000000 Foo 2008 10000000 Bar 2008 20000000 Foo 2009 12000000 Bar 2009 15000000 But the users consume, visualize and comprehend it in a denormalized fash...
What is the best way of formally expressing usability requirements?
Hi, I am writing a system requirements document and need to include non-functional requirements relating to the usability of the system, but am not sure of the best way to express this. "The system shall be easy to use" seems a bit vague to me, and not testable. Are there any 'official' standards/guidelines that can be adhered to relat...
Giving user feedback during long-running process and user-interface/business-logic separation
When a long-running process is being executed, it is a good practice to provide feedback to the user, for example, updating a progress bar. Some FAQs for GUI libraries suggest something like this: function long_running_progress() do_some_work() update_progress_bar() while finish do_some_work() update_progres...
Can humor cut down on perceived response time?
After reading a StackoOverflow question http://stackoverflow.com/questions/182112/funny-loading-statements-to-keep-users-amused, I was really intrigued to ponder upon this question "Can humor cut down on response time?" In a page loading lots of data, instead of just "please wait" or "loading data", can a humorous / funny / witty mess...
How does one use onmousedown/onmouseup correctly?
Whenever I write mouse handling code, the onmousedown/onmouseup/onmousemove model always seemed to force me to produce unnecessarily complex code that would still end up causing all sorts of UI bugs. The main problem which I see even in major pieces of software these days is the "ghost mouse" event where you drag to outside the window ...
What is the most intuitive, usable way of entering a time of day or a duration?
I'm building a line-of-business application in Silverlight and need to get the user to edit two .NET TimeSpan values. One is a time of day (relative to midnight) and the other is a duration. Currently I'm using two TextBoxes, formatted as hh:mm. This is pretty straightforward, but it could definitely be improved. I've observed people usi...
Is there a good replacement for Borenstein's "Programming as if People Mattered"?
Borenstein's classic book "Programming as if People Mattered" dates from 1991. Is there a more modern book (say from this millennium instead of the last) that covers similar ground in a similar way, without being product specific. ...
What is a good way of implementing HCI in OpenGL?
I'd like to try and implement some HCI for my existing OpenGL application. If possible, the menus should appear infront of my 3D graphics which would be in the background. I was thinking of drawing a square directly in front of the "camera", and then drawing either textures or more primatives on top of the "base" square. While the menu...
Help me get more information on Web Usability Studies
I am very interested in human computer interactions and mainly web interaction. Can you please tell me some studies, web sites, papers, links or research groups that are investigating Web pages design metrics similar to this http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/tarase/TaraseMetrics.pdf. ...
HCI: make the user wait through everything up front, or amortize?
I'm writing a silverlight app that queries a web service to populate a tree control. Each element will have at least 2 levels of children, so something like this: a +-b +-c d +-g +-h e +-i +-j f +-k +-l The web service API is such that I can only get one level of child nodes at a time, so the first trip, I can get a,d,e,f. T...
Why does the Squeak interface look and act so antiquated?
Don't get me wrong - I love Smalltalk, but... To me, the Squeak interface is one of the biggest turnoffs. I love Smalltalk - not the user interface. One only has to contrast modern interfaces like GNOME, MacOS X, and Windows Vista with their combination of ease of use and visually pleasing eye-candy with Squeak's flat 2-D cartoony 16-...
Should I use the user's current culture to compare computer names?
I've got a list view and a button. The list view has columns "Server Name", "Operating System" and "Description". The button populates the list view with computer records from Active Directory. The columns are clickable, and sort the list view as relevant. When doing the comparisons, should I be using the user's current culture setting...
Usability: Where do users focus their initial attention on in new interfaces?
I know there was a study somewhere that showed which places users focused on initially when presented with new interfaces, but I can't remember that study, nor remember exactly what behaviors could be assumed for most users of your program. From what I do remember, it came down that users often shoot towards the corners of a software ...
Coming from web development, how do I approach desktop app usability/design?
When developing a desktop application that has several groups of equally important data and operations, how do you tackle the user interface design? Most of the web-based apps I've developed have a simple home page with links to each service the app offers. Most of those pages contain lists of items in a database which you can drill dow...