Miscellaneous Debris

Avner Kashtan's Frustrations and Exultations
UI Usability - case studies and recommendations?

Doing work on our WinForm application, we find ourselves having to make choices - too many choices - about the UI. We don't have access to professional UI engineers, unfortunately, and we make uneducated guesses on too many issues - should we use a treeview or a filtered list? Should we use opacity in our floating toolbox windows?

 Lots of people have very strong opinions about these issues, but very few of us have anything to back them up except "In my experience...". What I'd love to have is some sort of good web-site that has white-papers, recommendations or analysis of different common UI widgets or patterns and how they translate to end-user usability.

Does anyone know of any such resource available on the 'net?

Published Tuesday, July 18, 2006 6:24 PM by AvnerK

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Comments

# re: UI Usability - case studies and recommendations?@ Tuesday, July 18, 2006 3:23 PM

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000057.html

This always seems a good place to start.

Also a wealth of information:

http://www.asktog.com/

Mischa Kroon

# re: UI Usability - case studies and recommendations?@ Tuesday, July 18, 2006 5:57 PM

Yeah, both are great resources and I turn to them both for ideas, but they deal mostly with larger concepts - affordances, Fitts' Law, etc. I'm looking for more concrete analysis of common UI elements and how those concepts apply to them.

Guess I'll just stick to convincing people the old way - by shouting louder. :)

AvnerK

# re: UI Usability - case studies and recommendations?@ Tuesday, July 18, 2006 8:59 PM

Good Job in the UI post!

Al

Albert Pascual

# re: UI Usability - case studies and recommendations?@ Wednesday, July 19, 2006 2:46 AM

G'day Avner, I have looked at http://time-tripper.com/uipatterns/index.php in the past, and it's proven to be a little helpful...might be of help to you in the situation you describe!

Cheers,

Thomas

Thomas Williams

# re: UI Usability - case studies and recommendations?@ Wednesday, July 19, 2006 3:43 AM

Thomas - this is exactly what I was looking for. This site - and http://designinginterfaces.com, which is a superset (temporarily available, will be removed soon - it's contained in an O'Reilly book) - give good analysis of UI design patterns with recommendations for when to use. Excellent!

AvnerK

# Did you try usability tests?@ Sunday, July 23, 2006 12:42 PM

The most serious usability issues show up fast in even the simplest usability testing. Get someone not from your team to try out your interface and see how they´re doing.

Ori Folger

# re: UI Usability - case studies and recommendations?@ Thursday, September 28, 2006 12:43 PM

Hi Avner,

At the risk of sounding self-promotional (sorry!) I've been amazed at how often that very frustration about internal debates over design issues is why Web Mystery Shoppers gets hired. We use at least 30 testers per website usability test (often 100 or more) so that we have statistical reliability in our results. That tends to resolve those debates, because the evidence is objective.

While it is true, as Ori Folger said, that a small usability test will find the big issues, you sometimes need a large test to solve debates that relate to more subtle issues such as those you describe.

Tema Frank

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