User Interface Blog

This week I have holiday, but I’m trying to post interesting articles if I see them. Please come back next week for new entries.

Thanks for your patience.
Marco

Jensen Harris - Office 12 Usability team, Microsoft - has two great blog entries about the history and the development of the status bar.

A Brief History of the Status Bar

“…First introduced as a standard OS control as part of the Windows 95 common control library, the status bar has its roots in character mode programs, in which the bottom row of text was reserved space to show information about the program, document, or selection. Commonly, the status bar in character mode programs would tell you which keys to press to perform certain actions.”

Status Bar Update

“…We came to the conclusion that it did make sense for the Office 12 frame to contain a status bar. There were many “status-like” items that needed a place in the UI–document load information, printing status, long recalculation in Excel, and other background tasks.

There are also a number of add-ins to Office that people have written which expect the status bar. One could have imagined trying to integrate every piece of status into a separate place in the UI (as someone mentioned yesterday, perhaps putting page number in the scrollbar, for instance), but in the end we decided to stick with simplicity and leave a status area at the bottom of the screen.

But at the same time, we knew that these “in-progress” status updates wouldn’t always be up, and we didn’t want the status bar to be just a wasted piece of screen real-estate with just the words “Press F1 for Help” showing most of the time.

So, we started to think of how to use the space in a way that made sense with the rest of the Office 12 design. First, we made the decision to use the right side of the status bar area a place to host view switching, window switching, and zoom control–basically, everything that controls how your window looks. We thought it was consistent to have these “window frame commands” near the scroll bars and it gave us an ideal, standard place to host these controls in a way that increased the usable density of the UI.”

Today is the birthday of Louis Braille (Jan 4th 1809). He is the inventor of the braille method for blind people. In 1829, when he was twenty years old, he published his book Method of Writing Words, Music and Plainsong by Means of Dots for Use by the Blind and Arranged for Them. This book explained for the first time the reading and writing method that would be known as braille.

For more information have a look at the Louis Braille Center.

The Story of Louis Braille

There was a time, not long ago, when most people thought that blind people could never learn to read. People thought that the only way to read was to look at words with your eyes.

A young French boy named Louis Braille thought otherwise. Blind from the age of three, young Louis desperately wanted to read. He realized the vast world of thought and ideas that was locked out to him because of his disability. And he was determined to find the key to this door for himself, and for all other blind persons.

This story begins in the early part of the nineteenth century. Louis Braille was born in 1809, in a small village near Paris. His father made harnesses and other leather goods to sell to the other villagers. Louis’ father often used sharp tools to cut and punch holes in the leather.

One of the tools he used to makes holes was a sharp awl. An awl is a tool that looks like a short pointed stick, with a round, wooden handle. While playing with one of his father’s awls, Louis’ hand slipped and he accidentally poked one of his eyes. At first the injury didn’t seem serious, but then the wound became infected. A few days later young Louis lost sight in both his eyes. The first few days after becoming blind were very hard.

But as the days went by Louis learned to adapt and learned to lead an otherwise normal life. He went to school with all his friends and did well at his studies. He was both intelligent and creative. He wasn’t going to let his disability slow him down one bit.

As he grew older, he realized that the small school he attended did not have the money and resources he needed. He heard of a school in Paris that was especially for blind students. Louis didn’t have to think twice about going. He packed his bags and went off to find himself a solid education.

When he arrived at the special school for the blind, he asked his teacher if the school had books for blind persons to read. Louis found that the school did have books for the blind to read.

These books had large letters that were raised up off the page. Since the letters were so big, the books themselves were large and bulky. More importantly, the books were expensive to buy. The school had exactly fourteen of them.

Louis set about reading all fourteen books in the school library. He could feel each letter, but it took him a long time to read a sentence. It took a few seconds to reach each word and by the time he reached the end of a sentence, he almost forgot what the beginning of the sentence was about. Louis knew there must be a better way.

There must be a way for a blind person to quickly feel the words on a page. There must be a way for a blind person to read as quickly and as easily as a sighted person.

That day he set himself the goal of thinking up a system for blind people to read. He would try to think of some alphabet code to make his ‘finger reading’ as quick and easy as sighted reading.

Now Louis was a tremendously creative person. He learned to play the cello and organ at a young age. He was so talented an organist that he played at churches all over Paris.

Music was really his first love. It also happened to be a steady source of income. Louis had great confidence in his own creative abilities.

He knew that he was as intelligent and creative as any other person his own age. And his musical talent showed how much he could accomplish when given a chance.

One day chance walked in the door. Somebody at the school heard about an alphabet code that was being used by the French army. This code was used to deliver messages at night from officers to soldiers. The messages could not be written on paper because the soldier would have to strike a match to read it.

The light from the match would give the enemy a target at which to shoot. The alphabet code was made up of small dots and dashes. These symbols were raised up off the paper so that soldiers could read them by running their fingers over them. Once the soldiers understood the code, everything worked fine.

Louis got hold of some of this code and tried it out. It was much better than reading the gigantic books with gigantic raised letters.

But the army code was still slow and cumbersome. The dashes took up a lot of space on a page. Each page could only hold one or two sentences. Louis knew that he could improve this alphabet in some way.

On his next vacation home, he would spend all his time working on finding a way to make this improvement. When he arrived home for school vacation, he was greeted warmly by his parents.

His mother and father always encouraged him on his music and other school projects. Louis sat down to think about how he could improve the system of dots and dashes. He liked the idea of the raised dots, but could do without the raised dashes.

As he sat there in his father’s leather shop, he picked up one of his father’s blunt awls. The idea came to him in a flash. The very tool which had caused him to go blind could be used to make a raised dot alphabet that would enable him to read.

The next few days he spent working on an alphabet made up entirely of six dots. The position of the different dots would represent the different letters of the alphabet.

Louis used the blunt awl to punch out a sentence. He read it quickly from left to right. Everything made sense. It worked…

Phil Shapiro
Copyright 1995
All Rights Reserved

I read Kevin Cheng blog about conferences he want to visit in 2006. So I thought it would be nice to create a list of interesting Design and Usability conferences in 2006. Here is a list of conferences that I know. If you know any missing conference then please let me know it.

Web Design World
San Francisco, USA
Jan 30-Feb 1

Technology Entertainment Design (TED)
Monterey, USA
Feb 22-Feb 25

EclipseCon 2006
Santa Clara, USA
Mar 20-23

Information Architecture Summit 2006 (IA Summit)
Vancouver, Canada
Mar 23-27

Computer Human Interaction 2006 (CHI2006)
Montreal, Canada
Apr 22-Apr 26

HOW Design Conference
Las Vegas, USA
June 12-15

Usability Professionals Association 2006 (UPA)
Broomfield, USA
Jun 12-16

Mensch und Computer 2006
Gelsenkirchen, Germany
Sep 3-6

HCI 2006 Engage!
London, UK
Sep 11-15

User Interface 11 (UI11)
Cambridge, USA
Oct 9-12

OOPSLA 2006
Portland, USA
Oct 22-26

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.

…

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.