Human-centered approaches to industrial and interaction design have long focused on studying human behavior to create informed and appropriate designs. A social interaction designer must consider not only people, environment, and existing tools, but also the unseen elements of the system such as social relationships, power dynamics, and cultural rules.
Social Software: The Other ‘Design for Social Impact’
If you’re running a project where you mock up designs, get them approved, code them up, build a CMS, hook it all together, and then everyone looks around and says “Who’s got the content? Wait, this content doesn’t match the designs and it won’t fit in the CMS!” then you have a problem. A big problem.
Lorem Ipsum is not the cause of your problem. It’s a symptom. The real problem is an overall process that treats design and content as separate tracks without appropriate communication, collaboration, and checkpoints along the way.
In Defense of Lorem Ipsum
This post provides a list of more than 20 resources that can be used in sketching phase of application development categorized as follows:
- Printable sketch templates for websites
- Printable sketch templates for mobile applications
- Sketch Books
- Make you own sketch templates
A Collection of Printable Sketch Templates and Sketch Books for Wireframing
Freescale conducted extensive research with existing non-Windows netbooks and learned that both the user interface and form factor issues co-mingle in these devices. They approached the Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD) industrial design department and asked them to work on concepts that address issues for specific markets: tweens, teens and soccer moms.
Two sponsored courses that participated in this project. What follows is the class’ process for developing the initial framework and vision for a new graphical user interface to run on top of an existing operating system (like Linux) that can take advantage of an ARM CPU chipset on something akin to a netbook or a smartbook.
Case Study: Freescale Netbook Design at SCAD
Published in the ‘Ergonomics in Design’ journal in 1997. He collected and created this list of 34 thumb rules (given below in order of priority) that were found particularly useful during the design process by colleagues working in the human-computer interface (HCI) design field.
- Know thy user, and YOU are not thy user.
- Things that look the same should act the same.
- Everyone makes mistakes, so every mistake should be fixable.
- The information for the decision needs to be there when the decision is needed.
- Error messages should actually mean something to the user, and tell the user how to fix the problem.
- Every action should have a reaction.
- Don’t overload the user’s buffers.
- Consistency, consistency, consistency.
- Minimize the need for a mighty memory.
- Keep it simple.
- The more you do something, the easier it should be to do.
- The user should always know what is happening.
- The user should control the system. The system shouldn’t control the user. The user is the boss, and the system should show it.
- The idea is to empower the user, not speed up the system.
- Eliminate unnecessary decisions, and illuminate the rest.
- If I made an error, let me know about it before I get into REAL trouble.
- The best journey is the one with the fewest steps. Shorten the distance between the user and their goal.
- The user should be able to do what the user wants to do.
- Things that look different should act different.
- You should always know how to find out what to do next.
- Don’t let people accidentally shoot themselves.
- Even experts are novices at some point. Provide help.
- Design for regular people and the real world.
- Keep it neat. Keep it organized.
- Provide a way to bail out and start over.
- The fault is not in thyself, but in thy system.
- If it is not needed, it’s not needed.
- Color is information.
- Everything in its place, and a place for everything.
- The user should be in a good mood when done.
- If I made an error, at least let me finish my thought before I have to fix it.
- Cute is not a good adjective for systems.
- Let people shape the system to themselves, and paint it with their own personality.
- To know the system is to love it.
Expert Ratings of Usability Maxims (article access requires purchase)
Wireframes Magazine is a collection of UI design techniques and samples by interaction designers and information architects across the globe.
Wireframes Magazine
Summary
Users hate change, so it’s usually best to stay with a familiar design and evolve it gradually. In the long run, however, incrementalism eventually destroys cohesiveness, calling for a new UI architecture.
Fresh vs. Familiar: How Aggressively to Redesign
I heart wireframes is a collection of user contributed wireframes.
I ♥ wireframes
This article describes the following about wireframes:
- What are they?
- Why do we use them?
- When should they be used?
- What are the different types?
- How are they used in a project life cycle?
- Why are they important?
The what, when and why of wireframes
If you don’t want to read the post, you can choose to watch a 5 minute presentation of it below.
The following principles are fundamental to the design and implementation of effective interfaces, whether for traditional GUI environments or the web. Of late, many web applications have reflected a lack of understanding of many of these principles of interaction design, to their great detriment. Because an application or service appears on the web, the principles do not change. If anything, applying these principles become even more important.
Written in 2004 by Bruce Tognazzini but applicable today and tomorrow.
First Principles of Interaction Design