Posted by Sarah Rose on 17 April 2008
Stretching Your User Interface Design Muscles
A follow up to my previous post on innovation in user interface design:
If you want to keep up with cutting edge thinking on technology - in a very approachable, effective format - ReadWriteWeb is a must for your feed reader. I'm constantly amazed by the number of solid articles they generate every week. Here's one from a few weeks ago with a series of video examples of imaginative thinking about user input:
Another ReadWriteWeb article, and this one relates well to the Stephen Anderson presentation I linked to before. It talks about user interactions (web forms) that empathize with and engage the person working with the site. Excellent examples of usability "in the wild":
(via Aggregated Intelligence) A very effective way of designing any interaction with data (web form, application dialog box, even a paper report) is by prototyping. I have long favored MS Excel for working out database designs and report layouts; it's very simple way for end users to capture what they want to see, quickly rearranging and adjusting until it is just right. For on-screen dialogs, try PowerPoint; the second link below takes you to a "toolkit" of GUI components that let you work up sample screens / user interactions very quickly, using the comfortable environment of PowerPoint. Another option might be Visio - I've used versions of that package that included shape templates with lots of user interface widgets. Bottom line - it's a lot easier to sketch something out than to have to actually build something "real".
Also from the first article above ... if you don't think there's a difference between corporate IT UI and the consumer Internet - does this ring true for you?
Previously ...
If you want to be more than a programmer, stop programming (April 8, 2005)
Sometimes analogies work amazingly well ... (July 14, 2005)
Fighting with MS Access and version incompatibility (September 26, 2005)
Three Best TLAs of all time, the hegemony of Excel, and the Intuitive Front End (August 12, 2006)
Excel vs. RDBMS: Choosing the Technology, Winning the Arguments (March 11, 2007)
The Innovation Generation and User Interfaces (April 9, 2008)
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