This tutorial is based on the book GUI Bloopers 2.0: Common User Interface Design Don'ts and Dos. The book explains how to avoid common GUI design errors, illustrated with examples from commercial software and websites. The tutorial covers the more concrete bloopers from the book: GUI Control, Navigation, Textual, Graphic Design & Layout, and Interaction. Longer versions of the tutorial include class exercises in which participants review GUI of products and websites brought to class by instructor and by participants. It is intended for software designers and developers, mainly those who lack several years of experience designing and evaluating GUIs. After completing this class, participants will:
This tutorial is offered in full day (6.5 hrs, excluding breaks and lunch), half-day, and two-hour versions.
This talk is a short version of the GUI Bloopers tutorial. It describes a few bloopers in each category, and explains how to avoid them. The talk is illustrated with many examples of bloopers in commercially-available software products and websites. 1 - 1.5 hrs.
This talk focuses on one type of blooper: textual. It covers common textual bloopers that occur in computer-based products and services. The bloopers are followed up with advice on how to avoid them. The importance of using writers rather than engineers to write and review all text displayed by software is stressed, as is the importance of developing and adhering strictly to a project lexicon. 1 - 1.5 hrs (adjustable).
This tutorial is based on the book Web Bloopers: 60 Common Web Design Mistakes and How to Avoid Them. The book explains how to avoid common Web design errors, illustrated with examples from actual websites. The tutorial, like the book, organizes bloopers into categories: Content, Task-Support, Navigation, Form, Search, Text & Writing, Link Presentation, and Graphic and Layout. It includes class exercises in which participants review actual websites looking for bloopers and discuss how to improve them. The tutorial is intended for Web designers and developers, mainly those who lack several years of experience designing and evaluating websites and Web applications. Others who might benefit from this tutorial are web Q/A engineers, usability testers, and web development managers. After completing this full-day tutorial, participants will:
This tutorial is offered in full day (6.5 hrs, excluding breaks and lunch) and half-day versions.
This talk is a short version of the Web Bloopers tutorial. It describes a few bloopers in each category, and explains how to avoid them. The talk is illustrated with many examples of bloopers in commercially-available websites. Humorous but hard-hitting. 1-2 hrs (adjustable) [View independent review of this class.]
Bwah, hah, hah! Learn how to really screw up your website's users, or even drive them away. The Evil Web Designer, played by GUI and Web author and consultant Jeff Johnson, shares some of his best tricks for making commercial websites hard to learn, aggravating to use, unproductive, and useless. The Evil Web Designer's methods are drawn from the Web design mistakes Jeff compiled for Web Bloopers. They are illustrated using actual websites. A short, very humorous version of the Web Bloopers talk. 15-60 minutes (adjustable)
This tutorial surveys the knowledge that experienced user-interface designers draw upon in designing and evaluating software user interfaces. It provides a brief overview of the history of user-interface design as a recognized field of expertise, discusses the motivation for highly-usable products, and presents the important principles that guide successful UI design. Examples illustrating the benefits of following the principles -- and the pitfalls of not following them -- are provided from the instructor's experience. 2 or 4 hr. versions.
Many of today's interactive software products and services are not responsive enough. Responsiveness is one of the most important factors in determining customer satisfaction with software and online services, but it is continually slighted by developers. This tutorial is based on chapter 7 of GUI Bloopers. It distinguishes responsiveness from performance and points out that performance need not limit responsiveness. It explains that the user-computer interface is a real-time interface, with time-constraints that software must satisfy in order to be perceived as responsive. The tutorial also presents techniques for improving responsiveness despite limited or fluctuating processing resources. Many examples are provided of responsive and unresponsive systems. 1-1.5 hrs.
This tutorial describes the many different ways to test software user interfaces on real users, and why one might use form of testing vs. another. It is well-illustrated with screen-images and videotape clips. 1-1.5 hr. (Note: This tutorial is often combined with the following one.)
Explains how to conduct heuristic evaluation of interactive software, to supplement usability testing. 45 minutes-1 hr. (Note: This tutorial is often combined with the preceeding one.
The most important step in designing a user interface for a desktop or web-based application is to design a coherent, task-focused conceptual model. Unfortunately, this step is often skipped in software development. The result is incoherent, arbitrary, overly-complex applications that expose irrelevant concepts to users. Longer versions of the class include a hands-on exercise in performing Object/Actions analysis for a simple application. 1-3 hrs.
UI design rules are not simple recipes to be applied mindlessly. Applying them effectively requires determining their applicability (and precedence) in specific situations. It also requires balancing the trade-offs that inevitably arise in situations when design rules appear to contradict each other. By understanding the underlying psychology for the design rules, designers and evaluators enhance their ability to interpret and apply them. Explaining that psychology is the focus of this course. 1.5 or 3 hrs.
Explains in business terms why it is important for software development organizations to strive for highly-usable products. Describes how investing in usability can:
Describes how to decide when and how much to invest in usability. 1-1.5 hrs.
In 2004, two non-profit organizations developed a Web application to help monitor U.S. elections: the Election Incident Reporting System (EIRS). The mostly-volunteer team had only four months to develop a workable system. The aggressive schedule, limited budget, and distributed team-structure challenged us to find creative ways to evaluate and improve EIRS' usability. We used an approach that combined expert UI review with opportunistic exploitation of venues for gathering usability data. This approach, which we call convergent usability evaluation, had, in the non-profit environment, advantages over the more formal methods typically used for commercial projects. In this paper we describe the usability evaluation methods we used for the EIRS project and discuss how they converged to provide a more complete picture than we would have obtained by conventional methods. 45 minutes.
Tells the detailed story of a project in which the user-interface of an interactive movie game had to be greatly simplified before the game could be released. Provides a well-illustrated example of how UI designers perform task analysis, develop design ideas, and test them even when resources for testing are limited. Illustrated with clips from the movie game. 1 hr.
Demystifies statistical analysis. Provides a common-sense understanding, and some simple statistical methods for analyzing usability test results. Half-day seminar.
