Entries Tagged 'Interface Design' ↓

Lana Kovacevic has a post on Builder.au enumerating Andy Budd’s seven aspects of a great user experience. Andy does a good job relating each principle to a real-world experience. Nothing really unexpected, but a good read nonetheless.

Jeff Atwood has an excellent post on the importance of UI-Driven Development. If you haven’t heard of this before, this is a good article to check out. It has plenty of links to supporting arguments and explanations about why you should develop the user interface of your application first.

Bill Scott, Director of UI Engineering at Netflix, has posted slides from his UI Design Anti-Patterns talk on his site. The slides are good, pointing out lots of pitfalls to avoid when designing user interfaces. The slides also make a reference to Yahoo! Design Pattern Library which is an invaluable resource when trying to come up with new widgets for your GUI.

Jakob Nielsen has a top-ten list on his site regarding top application design mistakes. It’s a good list including things we’ve been hearing from usability experts for a long time now, such as Non-Standard GUI Controls, Inconsistency, and No Feedback. As a bonus design mistake, Nielsen aims at those reset buttons you see all the time on web forms.

Cathy Shive writes today about the balance between computer administrative debris and useful features in a user interface. Nice article with screenshots of applications with a large amount of debris contrasting with applications that get out of the users way.

Ben Galbraith has posted a transcript of Alan Cooper’s keynote at IxDA’s Interaction 08 on Ajaxian today. It’s a bit long, but overall an inspiring and worthwhile read. [For those of you who don’t know who Alan Cooper is, he is an authority on interaction design and the author of About Face and The Inmates are Running the Asylum.]

Smashing Magazine presents the ten principles of effective web design today. Good advice that will come in handy during the foojam redesign coming up in the next few days.

Wake Up Later has an interesting blog post regarding eight design mistakes programmers often make. FooJam.com is an example of what this article is trying to prevent As a developer myself, I often struggle with design and user interfaces. This article provides some good advice.

UI-Patterns.com is a library of user interface design patterns. Each pattern has an explanation along with examples of the pattern from popular sites and a list of related patterns.

Too often, the usability of an application is either an after-thought or not considered at all. Smashing Magazine has a list of 10 recommended usability and interface design books. If you’re involved in the coding or design of user interfaces (web-based applications included), I would highly recommend picking up one or more of these.