User Interface Blog

Microsoft releasd the Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the Expression Interactive Designer. (Only a .NET password is required for downloading the preview.) Expression Interactive Designer is used for creating the user interface and layout of Web or Windows applications

Design the applications of your dreams.

Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer helps you create streamlined, innovative and just plain beautiful applications. Users experience increased satisfaction, while you develop in a flexible, productive environment.
Source: Microsoft Expression Overview

Does anybody had a look at the preview or tried to create a user interface?

Download

• Download the CTP of Expression Interactive Designer

Videos

• Sparkle CTP Released
• Introducing Sparkle
• View Product Demos

External Links

• The Sparkle in Your Eye? - A Flasher’s Initial Review of Microsoft Interactive Designer

Most icons in today applications are not very descriptive for the task they represent. As example have a look at application icons for a web browser. Internet Explorer’s icon is the letter E graphically designed, Firefox is a fox on a planet and Safari is a compass.

To quote Tom Bridge:

…is the language of computing something we have to train people into doing, or is it really as easy as we’d like to believe? The answer’s in the icons, but like all pictures, the interpretation is key.

Source: Icons, Usability and Computers by Tom Bridge

In addition if you look at the icon guidelines of the various operating system (e.g. Microsoft, Mac)
then all details are very clearly specified, but I wonder why the real world design practice are not very unified.

Internal Links

• Application icon sets

External Links

• Apple Human Interface Guidelines: Icon, Apple
• Anatomy of an Icon, SimpleBits
• Creating Windows XP Icons, Microsoft
• Design of Graphic Images, Microsoft
• Do icons help your sites usability?, Webmaster World
• GNOME Human Interface Guidelines 2.0
• Icon Usability, Jakob Nielson
• KDE’s Icon Style Guide
• Icons, Usability and Computers

Jared Spool has written a great article about design patterns.

Design teams are discovering that a well-built design pattern library makes the user interface development process substantially easier. A quality library means team members have the information they need at their fingertips. Choosing usable components that work smoothly for users becomes the developer’s path of least resistance. Innovation, while not prohibited, is reserved for those times when it’s really necessary, allowing the team to leverage the work already done by others…

Source: The Elements of a Design Pattern by Jared Spool

User Interface of Xerox Star

Today I found two great articles about the history of the graphical user interface (GUI).

• A History of the GUI
• The real history of the GUI

Today I had a look at Wikipedia to look for various definitions.

• Data Visualization
• Ergonomics
• Graphical User Interface (GUI)
• Human-computer interactions (HCI)
• Patterns
• Software
• Style Guides
• Usability
• Usability Testing
• User Interface
• User Experience
• Web 2.0

Today I thought about adding a message board to my User Interface Blog. Is there any interest in having a message board to discuss usability, design or human factor issues?

Update: February 12, 2006
The User Interface Community has been launched.
http://community.user-interface.org/

The latest Engage! blog entry written by David Heller is about contextual buttons. The following quote is the introduction to contextual buttons:

I have noticed a trend in virtual interfaces that exploits their ephemeral nature, where a single button is used today where two buttons used to be used in the past. The button label is used to both clear a state of the system and the action the button can do. Who else finds they pause slightly in these contexts even after becoming “experts” in these systems?

Source: Contextual buttons; David Heller; January 17, 2006; Engage!