User Interface Blog

The SAP Design Guild website has a great collection of book reviews about user interface design and graphics design…

External Links

SAP Design Guild
SAP Design Guild - Book Reviews

Matt Queen has written an article about Interaction Modeling.

Interaction modeling is a good way to identify and locate usability issues with the use of a tool. Several methods exist (see Olson & Olson 1990 for a review of techniques). Modeling techniques are prescriptive in that they aim to capture what users will likely do, and not descriptive of what users actually did.
…
This article presents a three-part method of interaction modeling where:

• A prescriptive, preferred interaction model (PIM) is created
• A descriptive user-interaction model (UIM) derived from an actual user study session is created
• A model of problem solving and decision making (PDM) is used to interpret disparities between the first two models

It is a great article about interaction modelling.

Yesterday Yahoo! released its internal Yahoo! Design Pattern Library under a Creative Commons License.

Welcome to the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library. We are very happy to be sharing our library with the design and development community. This is our first drop of what we hope to be a monthly release cycle for the publication of patterns. In many cases we have bundled the patterns with pointers to related code from the Yahoo! User Interface Code Library.
Source: Yahoo! Design Pattern Library

The following web patterns are currently available:

• Auto-Complete
• Breadcrumbs
• Drag and Drop Modules
• Module Tabs
• Navigation Tabs
• Object Pagination
• Search Pagination
• Rating an Object
• Writing a Review

Reference Links

• Yahoo! Design Pattern Library, Yahoo
• Yahoo! Design Pattern Library, Functioning Form

Today I read the Windows Vista Top Guidelines Violations article that I found in the MSDN. I think this is a great comprehensive list which contains import issues when looking at the Windows Vista style.

This article summarizes the most common violations of the Microsoft® Windows Vista™ User Experience Guidelines, and offers guidelines for avoiding these violations. Most of these violations relate to changes in Windows Vista, resulting either from new features or new ways of considering existing features. Several of these violations aren ’t new to Windows Vista, but the guidelines were either missing, misunderstood, or not observed properly by Windows-based programs.
Source: Top Guidelines Violations, MSDN

The User Interface Community is a new message board for discussions about design, human-computer interactions, patterns, usability… Please have a look at it and let me know what you think.

I have updated my weblog software to Wordpress 2.01.

Apple has filled patents for a touch sensitive device and gestures for working with and manipulating the screen content.

Apple has filled a patent for Multipoint Touchscreen which allows up to 15 simulantous touches of the screen. This new hardware allows to recognise gestures for enabling a new kind of user interface. Some gestures are detailed in other patents.

Additionally Apple invented some interesting ideas to over come the big hands/small widgets problem and come up with the new Gestures for touch sensitive input devices patent. These new patents including methods for retrieving and interpreting the data from a multipoint enabled touchscreen to allow things like e.g. moving or zooming images.

Gesture User Interface

Apple Tablet Desing Study

Patents

Multipoint Touchscreen
Gestures for touch sensitive input devices
Visual expander

External Links

User interface for Apple Tablet
Apple Tablet and iPod? User interface ideas
Apple Multipoint Touchscreen
Apple Tablet Design