User Interface Blog

Today I upgraded my blogging software to Wordpress 2.0. I also updated my theme and added new links to the links page.

Matthew Ellison wrote an interesting article about the review of screen capture tools published by the WritersUA website.

Introduction

Almost all of us need to include screen captures in our user assistance from time to time. It can be very useful, for example, to include an annotated capture of the entire window in order to familiarize users with the layout of an application screen or dialog. Even if it’s not your policy to include captures of entire windows, you may still find it useful to include images of specific drop-down menus, toolbars, individual buttons, or cropped regions that highlight key elements of an application interface.

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In this article, I look at four of the leading screen capture tools for Windows, in addition to the screen capture utility included within Paint Shop Pro 9. There is a short review of each of the tools, including my view of each tool’s three key strengths and weaknesses. Finally, I have provided a table that compares the key features of all five of the tools side by side.

Today I read the Usability in the News blog and found a great link to the User Interface Design and Implementation - MIT Open Course series. It contains a lot of great information about user interface design.

Description of the User Interface Design and Implementation graduate course:

Highlights of this Course

This course features exams with solutions for multiple years. In addition, an extensive bibliography of assigned and recommended readings is provided in the readings section.

Course Description

6.831 introduces the principles of user interface development, focusing on three key areas:

• Design: How to design good user interfaces, starting with human capabilities (including the human information processor model, perception, motor skills, color, attention, and errors) and using those capabilities to drive design techniques: task analysis, user-centered design, iterative design, usability guidelines, interaction styles, and graphic design principles.
• Implementation: Techniques for building user interfaces, including low-fidelity prototypes, Wizard of Oz, and other prototyping tools; input models, output models, model-view-controller, layout, constraints, and toolkits.
• Evaluation: Techniques for evaluating and measuring interface usability, including heuristic evaluation, predictive evaluation, and user testing.

BayCHI has released a new audio session online. The latest session “Beyond Menus and Toolbars in Microsoft Office” is presented by Jensen Harris, lead UI designer for the Office UI suite. He presented his thoughts about Usability and the new Office 12 user interface

Original Announcement

Farewell, menus and toolbars. More than 20 years after the introduction of the Macintosh, software has outgrown the basic building blocks of today’s standard user interface. The upcoming version of Microsoft Office daway with the top-level menus and toolbars in favor of a new task-oriented, contextual user interface.

This talk will provide a historical perspective on the evolution of the Office user interface and the battle against the mounting complexity of the product. You’ll get a behind-the-scenes look at the different design iterations, and an in-depth look at the new Office UI constructs, including the Ribbon, galleries, contextual tabs, and the MiniBar. You’ll also learn the ideas behind “results-oriented design,” which Jakob Nielsen wrote, “might well be the way to empower users in the future.”

With 400 million Office users potentially making this transition, would embracing these concepts solve problems in your own products? A question and answer session will follow the talk.

You can view additonal BayCHI audio podcasts here.

Most applications today present dialog boxes with questions and often present two or more choices. As example, if you close a modified document in an application the Save dialog appears and present two choices, Yes and No. Where Yes indicates that the user want to save the document and No to discard the document changes. In addition the Save dialog often contains the Cancel option where the modified document will not be closed.

Following are example dialogs:

Save Dialog of Microsoft Notepad

Save Dialog of Microsoft Word

Dialogs of Microsoft Windows Vista operating system. The standard Save dialog presend Yes, No and Cancel whereas the Explorer present Try Again and Cancel.

I agree that in this example it is easy to determine that Save the changes means Yes and do not save the changes means No. But often it is difficult to determine the right choice. I like the approach to use verbs as choices instead of simply presenting Yes, No or Cancel. Often this is also recommend by current design standards

Apple Human Interface Guidelines

“Button names should be verbs that describe the action performed.”

KDE Standards

“Instead of labeling the OK option “OK”, it is better to provide options that are named in a way that describes what will happen when they are pressed.”

Microsoft

“The label for a command button should describe the button’s action. Aim for the shortest possible label; one word is best.”

User Interface Blog is listed under Top 40 for User Interface.

Jensen Harris observed in his latest blog entry that in usability studies the Help is mostly used by expert users.

Yet, in usability tests we see it again and again: novices and intermediates click around and experiment, experts try to reason things out and look them up in help.

Jensen lists a few issues for that:

• Only expert uses know the right keywords for looking something up.
• Often it is designed to troubleshoot not to teach a software.
• People learn software throughplaing with it, they rarely notice the help system.

Jensen also note in his blog entry that “…if you’re authoring your help system for newcomers, you might be designing for the wrong kind of person”. Is this valid for Online - Help in applications available on the market today or is this only valid for the MS-Office products? Is the current Online - Help system that we have today really not used by novice users?