• Quizlet on terms from this lecture

CH 3 - Guidelines, principles, and theories

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• Guidelines
• Principles
• Theories
• Difference
  • Guidelines are low-level, practical designs, principles are more abstract, and theories are even more abstract that try to make the design process easier
• Benefit of guidelines
  • Standardization of interfaces
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  • Consistency
  • Best practices
    • From practical experience
  • Or from studies
  • National Cancer Institute Guidelines
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    • Use radio buttons for binary choices
      • Prevents the user from being able to make a mistake
    • Use thumbnail images instead of larger images
      • Reduce page load time
      • Low internet speeds
      • Wasting time
  • 1986 Principles
    • Consistent data display / memory load
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    • Getting users’ attention
      • Changing color to a non-standard one
      • Size of elements
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      • Dangers
        • Flashing at a certain rate can harm or distract users
        • You can clutter your interface
    • Facilitating data entry
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      • Don’t make user input long lines of text
      • minimal input
        • Reduce errors
        • Reduce data processing on the back end
      • Consistency
        • Don’t confuse the users
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      • minimal memory load
        • Not making them remember too many things at once
      • compatibility entry/display
      • flexibility
• video
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• HHS 508 Compliance

Personas

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• No single design will be useful to all users in all situations so we want to picture a user when we design

Factors

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• Age
• Experience
• Origin or ethnicity
• purpose for using software

Exercise

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• Tasks and personas
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• Look at an interface you use frequently and think about the personas you might create

MyBama personas

• Inexperienced freshman
  • Register for classes
  • View their schedule
  • Find books
  • Find housing
  • Get a meal plan
  • Get Bama bound orientation
• Experienced senior
• Young Faculty
• Old faculty
• Old Students
• Foreign students

• Disabled students and faculty

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• Discussion
• Students
  • Existing
  • Incoming
• Faculty
• Parents
• Visitors

Tasks

user	register	schedule	find books	meal plans	e-mail	enter hours	payments	parking	input grades	set permissions
student	xx	xxxx	xx	x	xxxx		xx	xx
faculty									xxx

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Design choices

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• When do you choose to implement a language vs a GUI?

Schneiderman’s eight golden rules

• see Vocab
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How to design interfaces to prevent errors

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• Offer a tutorial
• Disable options that could cause you to cause an error or that aren’t currently an option
• Use standardized elements that they’ve seen before
• Reduce memory load

Vocab

Term	Definition
difference between guidelines, principles, and theories	Guidelines are low-level, practical designs, principles are more abstract, and theories are even more abstract that try to make the design process easier
guidelines	Make interfaces more consistent, are implemented from practical experience, and from studies
important guidelines	consistent data display, reduce memory load, use appropriate methods of getting attention, and facilitate data entry
persona	types of users you are designing for on a given project
factors of a persona	age, experience, origin or ethnicity, purpose for using software
508 compliance	means all users, regardless of disability status, can access technology
8 golden rules	prevent errors, universal usability, consistency, offer informative feedback, design dialogs to yield closure, keeping users in control, prevent short-term memory load, and reversible