Discussion 1 post responses.
Please respond to the following:
“Interface Design Guidelines” Please respond to the following:
• Imagine you are leading a team of designers for a new software product. During the kickoff meeting, the team starts to discuss design guidelines. About half of the team complains that guidelines can be too specific, incomplete, hard to apply, and sometimes wrong. The other half feels that building on experience from design leaders contributes to steady improvements. Take a stance on this debate and support your position. Then discuss how you would solve this conflict to get your meeting back on track.
• Of the eight principles of design, called “Golden Rules” (strive for consistency, cater to universal usability, offer informative feedback, design dialogues to yield closure, prevent errors, permit easy reversal of actions, support internal locus of control, and reduce short-term memory load) choose the one that is most important and create an argument supporting your choice. Use specific examples to support your argument.
NM’s post states the following:
Interface Design Guidelines are definitely necessary because it yields faster development time. It can improve communication among all the stakeholders, Teams, Managers, Project Managers and designers involved in developing the interface. If there is no guidelines there is NO DIRECTION. Without guidelines it could make the design be unsuccessful, not accomplish the goals, and be a useless design. You can ALWAYS learn from the experts and gain valuable knowledge, tips and lessons learned. So for these reasons, I totally agree with establishing interface design guidelines. These Guidelines are required to follow that help you design a standard and consistent experience throughout your products and most of the time are usually defined at organization level and equally helpful for designers, developers and testers. Also interfaces is easy to make a mess out of. You can start a project with one style and end with another. With having Interface Design guidelines, developers don’t have to wait for specs and they can refer to guidelines and build interfaces and it is convenient to update guidelines based on new standards and trends, and update your designs accordingly.
I would put the meeting back on track by stating this simple statement; “If you want to design a cohesive and consistent experience among your products, then WE must have a set of guidelines”.
https://uxplanet.org/why-you-need-ui-guidelines-d380e407b759?gi=902e7d744908
Of the eight principles of design, called “Golden Rules” (strive for consistency, cater to universal usability, offer informative feedback, design dialogues to yield closure, prevent errors, permit easy reversal of actions, support internal locus of control, and reduce short-term memory load) choose the one that is most important and create an argument supporting your choice. Use specific examples to support your argument.
Interface design is the study of methods that facilitate the smooth interaction or use of produced items. The area focuses on reducing the number of controls, placing them in locations that promote easy use, and providing constant feedback.
Oh my it was extremely hard to select just one.
I have chosen Permit easy reversal of actions. Since Interface design focuses already on reducing the number of controls, promoting easy use and providing constant feedback, I have chosen permit easy reversal of actions. I think designers should aim and try to offer their users obvious ways to reverse their actions. The reversals should be allowed at any point be it data entry, sequence of actions or a single action. I feel this feature would allow users to have less anxiety when performing tasks or trying out new tasks. I feel it will allow the user to continue to explore the unfamiliar knowing if they mess up, action can be undone/reversed. Just think about it. Sometimes users push a button or click yes before they thoroughly read and understood the action(s) they are performing and the impact that action can have. To me, being able to undo actions will allow GREAT satisfaction from the users.
This will allow the user to quickly backtrack whatever they are doing. This allows for users to explore without the constant fear of failure, messing something up and doing something wrong and not being able to change it. You definitely don’t want your user to feel like they have to be extremely careful with every action they take; that could become nerve-racking experience that no user wants to face or experience.
Great example I found was the typewriter vs. the word. Type writer you have to type slowly as not to make mistakes then you have to take paper out and white it out. Word processor you can hit delete or backspace and resume with your writing. How SWEET
In today’s world this helps me out a lot. There have been several times I typed an email and mistakenly hit send now you can unsend or retract etc. within a certain time frame. Once again HOW SWEET.
On the web, would be removing items from a cart, etc.
https://www.frantic.com/blog/the-golden-rules-back-to-the-basics
https://www.ics.com/blog/eight-golden-rules-rule-6-permit-easy-reversal-actions-0
JN’s post states the following:
Interface design guidelines are necessary in order to produce a usable product that will backup the knowledge learned during information gathering and research. It is vital to have stakeholders and users involved in the design guidelines process, as this is often left out, users/stakeholders requirements and needs could be left out. Inviting them into the guideline design process helps the users/stakeholders feel more a part of the project and will most likely adopt the final product much faster. (Wit., D.D., 2019) Design guidelines are important, because they will prevent unforeseeable scope creep or unwanted changes; for instance, one of the designer recommending something that makes absolutely no sense – the guidelines can be used to squash such randomness and changes. A workshop or something similar, should be scheduled between users/stakeholders/project team to develop the guidelines “the lanes” the project should stay within. Once these are set, principles and rules can then be developed and followed. Once guidelines have been established, and users/stakeholders appear happy – the team can hit the ground running, and when issues arise with conflict, bringing everyone back into the guidelines process will fix them.
The “Golden Rules” are applicable to interactive systems and environments, these rules have been developed over the last three decades and will help any designer in building a proper interface. The most important rule is keeping the users in control. (Schneiderman, B., 2018) From both professional and personal experience, this is by far extremely important as most people tend to enjoy a little power/control over something. The interface is just as good as anything else to feel that “power”, users that have been a part of design will understand what is going on much more and feel more apt to utilize the system. I’ve seen some instances where a brand new employee was brought on board and spent a solid month sitting around. They were never trained on the system and had no idea how to navigate and were afraid of breaking; spin 180 degrees to the seasoned engineer that helped build the system – they are on it 8 hours a day nonstop, because they understand it, know how it works, and can “make it do” what they want. Surprises or anything new can be scary and lead to work stoppage – if you have had the opportunity to watch the Croods, I think it’s Pixar/Disney, there are a few great parts about “anything new is bad, anything different is bad” much like the control of the interface and understanding it.
References:
Shneiderman, B. (2018). Designing the user interface: strategies for effective human-computer interaction. Boston: Pearson.
Wit, D. D. (2019, August 7). Design guidelines: how I get design done. Retrieved from https://uxdesign.cc/design-guidelines-how-i-got-design-done-9dbb5fbac820
Discussion 2 post responses.
Please respond to the following:
“HCI Theories” Please respond to the following:
• Imagine you are the manager of a medium-sized IT department. While walking through the hall one day, you overhear a senior-level software developer telling a newly hired developer to focus on improving his coding skills rather than learning about theories related to human-computer interaction. Take a position on whether you agree or disagree with the senior software developer. Support your decision.
• From the e-Activity, discuss the idea that all applications have to be visually consistent. Argue whether you agree or disagree with the idea and why.
NM’s post states the following:
“HCI Theories” Please respond to the following:
Imagine you are the manager of a medium-sized IT department. While walking through the hall one day, you overhear a senior-level software developer telling a newly hired developer to focus on improving his coding skills rather than learning about theories related to human-computer interaction. Take a position on whether you agree or disagree with the senior software developer. Support your decision.
From the e-Activity, discuss the idea that all applications have to be visually consistent. Argue whether you agree or disagree with the idea and why.
I disagree I feel learning about theories related to human-computer interaction is extremely important in order to develop and code software programs that will be extremely user friendly to the users because it describes and categorizes user activity and behavior. Users want to uses prefer to have the ease of use of the products/programs they use. The new “and old employee” both needs to know and realize that the goal of HCI is to improve the interaction between users and computers by making computers more user-friendly and receptive to the user’s needs and without this the users will ditch your software, be hesitant to use or continue to research for a better software developer and programs; so it is critical for software developers to study and be extremely knowledgeable of HCI OR they could waste their time developing and coding software that the user can’t understand and will be reluctant to use or won’t use- which could be a waste for all parties!!! ALWAYS remember USER SATISFACTION (not your own satisfaction)!!
I feel it is ideal that all applications have to be visually consistent that there are great benefits of Visual Consistency in User Interface Design such as Increased Usability
A web design that’s more usable attracts more traffic towards it, and visual consistency is a great way to increase usability of your UI design. This is because it helps in arranging and publishing content in a structured manner
Eliminates Flawless Communication
An excellent UI design is one that makes it easy for users to access the most important content quickly and with ease. To do so, it is important that your user interface design prioritizes the content that you would like to show your users in a particular manner. Achieving visual consistency between design elements on your web page can help you in highlighting the most important part of your website data in a clear and concise manner.
Lastly, Visual Consistency is highly useful and makes the world a better place because usability and learnability improve when similar elements have consistent look and function in similar way. When consistency is present in a design, people can transfer knowledge to new contexts and learn new things quickly and hopefully without pain.
References:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320409133_Importance_of_Human-Computer_Interaction_HCI
PF’s post states the following:
Statement:
I disagree with the senior software developer concerning that advice to the newly hired developer since more focus currently is on improving human-computer interaction (HCI) rather than concentrating on technical coding skills.
Response
How can a developer implement or plan for HCI without knowing how to code to achieve the desired outcome? Do developers just plan how things should work and leave the coding to someone else?
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