Results for the Discussion for User Interface
What are the categories that need to be addressed?
How are items priortized?
Beyond buttons: What else needs to be looked at?
Patterns in user interfaces
Interaction Patterns in User Interfaces
Outside views of the sakai UI
Complaints about the user interface. (found this via del.icio.us feed on sakai...)
http://mfeldstein.com/index.php/weblog/whats_wrong_with_the_sakai_user_interface/
Understanding UI guidelines
Right now the sakai style guide is about defining interface conventions. This is a good thing for the programmers and for the consistency about tools, but it says nothing of visual style or the overall user experience we want our students and faculty to experience.
Overview of Interface design principles
http://www.lukew.com/resources/articles/VCFWAD_April2005.pdf
Apple has a remarkable UI process. Here is their UI developer recommendations. Note that they contain user experience as well as technical implementation directives.
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/OSXHIGuidelines/index.html
Comments (6)
Jun 14, 2005
Ben Brophy says:
The style guide's primary aim is to provide the people who use Sakai with a cons...The style guide's primary aim is to provide the people who use Sakai with a consistent user experience. So the rules around interaction are very much in the tradition of design patterns. For example the style guide entry on forms describes where and how to arrange the buttons:
That's not very exciting stuff, but it's handy for designers (and programmers) who want their tools to be consistent with the rest of Sakai. I know from experience people get driven mad by buttons being in a different places and order as they move through an application.
Even though that's not exciting, I think it's fair to say that it does say something about visual style and overall user experience. I found it very useful in designing the gradebook, and heard good things from other UI designers applying it to Sakai tools. I wish the style guide had been part of Sakai 1.5, and that it were more thoroughly applied to Sakai 2.0.
I'm eager to hear any specific feedback on the style guide. I'm watching the page, but you can also email me directly: benbr@mit.edu
Jun 15, 2005
Bill Crosbie says:
Ben, I'm in total agreement with you. Consistency in user interface is extremely...Ben,
I'm in total agreement with you. Consistency in user interface is extremely important. (I'm showing my age, but I still remember the dot commands from WordStar, later used in the borland Turbo (Pascal/C/C++/Prolog). The consistency made me more productive with those editors.)
What I heard people asking for at the conference was something that had 'a little bit more' with regards to the human aspect. Some of the frustration xpressed by end users was that having the widgets be consistent is useless if the overall experience is poor. (Vivie, please comment here...)
I linked to the Apple developer stuff to show that their style guide handles both the user experience and the technical description of 'this is how this widget is meant to be used.'
We won't get it right the first time necessarily, but if we keep tweaking and modifying our approach, we can make consistent, usable interfaces. Having said that - we need a way to mock up designs and test them much more quickly. Daphne, any ideas?
So
Jun 15, 2005
Ben Brophy says:
I agree consistency is only a starting point. The style guide is just a tool, an...I agree consistency is only a starting point. The style guide is just a tool, and using it certainly doesn't guarantee a good user experience. The efforts in Sakai by and large have been architecture driven, and deadline driven - UI has been low on the list of priorities. As a result many of the tools in Sakai feel like "proof of concept" tools. They weren't designed and tested before coding began. Applying the style guide to them retroactively is putting lipstick on a pig. Even now there is a rush to create new sectioning and resource tools for v2.1 that will mean developing those tools without user input or user testing.
The rush is understandable - the framework has to be a priority (Sakai won't work without it) and the deadlines are very very tight. But I hope as we move into 2006 we can start taking a look at the functionality in Sakai and take the time to do it right.
Jun 16, 2005
John Norman says:
A general comment on User Interaction: Our novice users are reassured by the ext...A general comment on User Interaction: Our novice users are reassured by the extensive use of confirmation pages in Bb. Something like: "your update has been saved, click here to continue"
I can see that this would become tedious for an experienced user, but if the message also contained a link to suppress further confirmations for a particular user, each would be able to decide when their confidence in the system was greater than their need for reassurance. (Watching how soon different users switched this off might also be an interesting datapoint on useability)
Jun 16, 2005
Ben Brophy says:
We did something like that in the gradebook. When an assignment is added (for ex...We did something like that in the gradebook. When an assignment is added (for example) the user is returned to the overview age, but with a message at the top of the page that says "Assignment has been added." outlined in green with a little checkbox next to it. So there aren't any extra confirmation pages, but there is an alert to let people know something happenned. I think experienced users will be able to easily ignore the message. I've seen this design pattern more and more in recent years - for example it mirrors what happens when you reorder your queue in Netflix, you wind up back on the queue page, but with a confirmation message.
I'd like to see how the gradebook does in user testing, and if it goes well, add this pattern to the style guide. Do you think that's a good approach for adding design patterns to the style guide?
Jun 16, 2005
Ray Davis says:
FWIW, I've seen the lightweight notification approach verify success without int...FWIW, I've seen the lightweight notification approach – verify success without interrupting workflow – work very well across a range of applications from children's multimedia authoring to programmer's editors.