Archive for the ‘Usability Books’ Category
Prototyping Tidbits from Usability Engineering Book
Leave a CommentI’m halfway through the book Usability Engineering of Jakob Nielsen. The title can be intimidating but if you have been a long time in usability, you might get bored with it because the stuff here are basic, and can be tad old-school. But still I highly recommend this to those interested of with application usability. It provides with the very basic fundamentals of application usability arena.
Usability Engineering by Jakob Nielsen
One thing that struck me as something new, which I only met in this book is about two dimension of prototyping an application.
Horizontal & Vertical Prototyping
Horizontal prototyping — keeps the feature but eliminates depth of functionality.
Vertical prototyping — gives full functionality for a few features.
I can relate it now with the coaching application that I am bug testing. We put it on beta mode, but realized that we need to put more flexibility to its different features before we can finally say it is on beta mode. I guess with the app I am working on, it is on the Horizontal prototyping category. It probably has all kinds of features dumped into it, but with regards to the depth of functionality for each feature, it still has a long way to go.
One thing I learned from this is that there is no quick way to build an application. It is like writing a book, it takes time and a lot of revisions to make it a classic literature. It is something everyone on the team to be prepared, each one should have a bigger visualization of the different possibilities of the application. And, also being prepared of the possibility that there will be endless build and scratch — it can be painful and can get wary sometime.
Smashing Book
I do not follow smashing magazine but i read a few articles from them from time to time. And, they seem to be a good reference for the popular usability design patterns for web applications. So i’m pretty much inyerested to get hands of their Smashing Book. But I cannot seem to find this book on amazon.
I’m from Philippines so it gets doubly difficult for me to get this when I cannot order it from amazon. =(
Edit: Looking at the comments on their site, I think I will wait until things get a little stable with their fulfillment process.
Human Behavioral Patterns to Be Considered When Designing Interfaces
I just finished reading ‘Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design‘ by Jenifer Tidwell. For the highlight of the book is the common human behavioral patterns which makers (programmer, designers) of application should take into consideration when designing their product. Following are the behavioral patterns outlined in J. Tidwell’s book:
* Safe-exploration – ‘Let me explore without getting lost or getting into trouble.”
* Instant gratification – ‘I want to accomplish something now, not later.’
* Satisficing (combination of satisfying & sufficing) - “This is good enough. I don’t want to spend more time learning to do it better.”
- people are willing to accept ‘good enough’ instead of best if learning all the alternative might cost time and effort
* Changes in midstream – ‘I changed my mind about what I was doing.’
- interruptions in the middle of the task
* Deferred choices - ‘I don’t want to answer that now, just let me finish.’
* Incremental construction - ‘Let me change this. That doesn’t look right; let me change it again. That’s better.’
- feedback is critical. constantly show the user what the whole things looks & behaves like what the user works.
* Habituation - ‘That gesture works everywhere; why does not it work here, too?’
- that’s why consistency across application is important
* Spatial memory - ‘I swear that button was here a minute ago. Where did it go?’
– when people arrange things themselves, they’re likely to remember where they put them.
* Prospective Memory - ‘I’m putting this here to remind myself to deal with it later.’
* Streamlined Repetition – ‘I have to repeat this how many times?’
* Keyboard Only - ‘Please don’t make me use the mouse.’
* Other people’s advice – ‘What did everyone else say about this?’
These are common behavioral patterns which actually just not happen when people are learning a new application. In any new gadget, people always work around the above behaviors when exploring a gadget.
The design patterns then presented by Tidwell are designed based on these common human behaviors when interacting with software applications. There are probably a lot of human patterns to be discovered. It will be interesting to know if there are changes on how people explore applications since people are now more exposed to the internet technology.
Workflow… workflow.. workflow design of application
I am halfway through the book, Designing Social Interfaces. I got bored with it. For one, the writers are both from Yahoo so most of their examples are Yahoo applications. And, it’s been ages I have not peered into yahoo website. I no longer use yahoo messenger because I use Skype or fring. Though recently, I use flickr for tabongphotography.com. I think it is just me but I never find flickr that user-friendly. I felt there is too much clutter in it. But on the other thought, the book is about SOCIAL interfaces so I guess flickr is a great example.
The other reason why I’m already bored with the book because it still not able to answer my ultimate ‘wonder’ — which is how to create a smooth workflow for a web application. I started now to believe that design and workflow are different things.
On the other thought, I am just halfway through the book so designing workflow might be tackled in the later part of the book.
So, yes, I want someone who can talk about workflow design of software application like ABC.
