About Face Chp. 16 - 17
Chp. 16
Personas and scenarios help designers create products that work well for the consumer. Some consistent and generalizable patterns of user needs should inform how our products are designed.
Learnability and Help
Methods of helping users understand and learn an interface. Data entry is straightforward, commands that activate a function are more difficult to learn, since users need to figure out both what commands are available and how they are being used. Command modalities are the distinct techniques for allowing users to issue these instructions of the application. pedagogic modality—commands that teach their behavior using inspection, used by beginners. perpetual intermediates often want to leave menus behind to find more immediate and efficient tools, in the form of immediate and invisible commands. information in the world and information in the head to refer to different ways that users access information. Information in your head is much faster and easier to use than information in the world, but you are responsible for ensuring that you learn it, that you don’t forget it, and that it stays up to date. Information in the world is slower and more cumbersome, but very dependable.
Customizability:
Designer’s struggling with the idea of making their products user customizable, solution is to cast the problem in a different light, by allowing them to decorate the walls. Also changing the color of objects on the screen is a personalization task. Tools for personalizing must be simple and easy to use. Configuration is desirable for more experienced users. Half of the users clearly prefer one idiom, and the other half prefer another. This sort of clear division of a population’s preferences into two or more large groups indicates that their preferences are idiosyncratically modal.
Localization and Globalization:
Localization refers to translating an application for a particular language and culture.
Globalization refers to making an application as universal as possible across many languages
and cultures. Can be difficult to create a universal software when having to take in different languages
and symbols from different regions and countries. Idioms sometimes need to be changed depending
on which region it is in. Different languages also have a role in changing sizing in layouts, as some words
are longer in different languages, like spanish. So thi scan effect button sizes, and how text and other
menus/toolbars are sized and set up to not be cluttered. Asian languages can be difficult to sort alphabetically.
Accessibility:
Designing your app so that it can be effectively used by people with cognitive, sensory, or motor impairment due to age, accident, or illness. For a product to be considered accessible by both impair and non impaired users it must:
Users can perceive and understand all instructions, information, and feedback.
Users can perceive, understand and easily manipulate any controls and inputs.
Users can navigate easily, and always be aware of where they are in interface and navigational structure.
Create an accessibility persona before designing. Accessibility guidelines:
Leverage OS accessibility tools and guidelines
Don't override user selected system settings
Enable standard keyboard access methods
Incorporate display options for those with limited vision.
Provide visual-only and audible only output.
Don’t flash, flicker, or blink visual elements
Use simple, clear, brief language
Use response times that support all users
Keep layouts and task flows consistent
Provide text equivalents for visual elements.
Chp. 17
Dedicate significant work to clearly communicating to your users both what content is available and how they can interact with it. Visual interface design is concerned with the treatment and arrangement of visual elements to communicate behavior and information. Visual interface design capitalizes on the human ability to differentiate between objects by distinct visual appearance, and in so doing scerates meaning that is richer than the use of words alone.
Context: the context of use must be taken as part of the givens that constrain the visual design.
Shape: Is the primary way we recognize what an object is.
Size: larger things bring more attention. Size is also an ordered and quantitative variable, which means that people automatically sequence objects in terms of their size and tend to assign relative quantities to those differences.
Color: User’s goals, environment, the content, and the brand. Value- is an ordered variable, Hue, saturation, HSV in combination.
Orientation: Is it pointing up, down, or sideways? This is a useful variable to employ when you have directional information to convey (up or down, backward or forward).
Texture: Is seldom useful for conveying differences or calling attention, since it requires a lot of attention to distinguish.
Position: is both an ordered and quantitative variable, useful when conveying information about hierarchy. Spatial relationships can in turn be used to allude to conceptual relationships, items grouped together on the screen are interpreted as similar.
Text and Typography: Written language can convey dense and nuanced information, but you must be careful to use text appropriately, because it also has great potential to confuse and complicate. People recognize words primarily by their shapes. The more distinct the shape, the easier the word is to recognize. Caps are difficult to read.
Information Hierarchy: visual designers create an information hierarchy, using differences in visual attributes (large vs. small, light vs. dark, top vs. bottom, etc.) to stratify the interface.
Motion and change over time: Any of the elements mentioned in this section can change over time to convey information, relationship between parts, command attention, ease transitions between modes, and confirm the effects of commands. Mastery of how building blocks change over time, and especially motion, is a vital skill for the visual interface designer.
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