Usability Evaluation Of User Interface Design

User Interface Design and Evaluation provides an overview of the user-centered design field. It illustrates the benefits of a user-centered approach to the design of software, computer systems, and websites. The book provides clear and practical discussions of requirements gathering, developing interaction design from user requirements, and user interface evaluation. The book's coverage includes established HCI topics—for example, visibility, affordance, feedback, metaphors, mental models, and the like—combined with practical guidelines for contemporary designs and current trends, which makes for a winning combination. It provides a clear presentation of ideas, illustrations of concepts, using real-world applications. This book will help readers develop all the skills necessary for iterative user-centered design, and provides a firm foundation for user interface design and evaluation on which to build. It is ideal for seasoned professionals in user interface design and usability engineering (looking for new tools with which to expand their knowledge); new people who enter the HCI field with no prior educational experience; and software developers, web application developers, and information appliance designers who need to know more about interaction design and evaluation. Co-published by the Open University, UK. Covers the design of graphical user interfaces, web sites, and interfaces for embedded systems. Full color production, with activities, projects, hundreds of illustrations, and industrial applications.

Designed to get readers quickly up and running with the full complement of UI strategies, tools, and techniques, this extremely practical guide offers step-by-step guidance to all important methods now in use, in chapters authored by the methods' inventors themselves.

The recent advances in display technologies and mobile devices is having an important effect on the way users interact with all kinds of devices (computers, mobile devices, laptops, tablets, and so on). These are opening up new possibilities for interaction, including the distribution of the UI (User Interface) amongst different devices, and implies that the UI can be split and composed, moved, copied or cloned among devices running the same or different operating systems. These new ways of manipulating the UI are considered under the emerging topic of Distributed User Interfaces (DUIs). DUIs are concerned with the repartition of one of many elements from one or many user interfaces in order to support one or many users to carry out one or many tasks on one or many domains in one or many contexts of use – each context of use consisting of users, platforms, and environments. The 20 chapters in the book cover between them the state-of-the-art, the foundations, and original applications of DUIs. Case studies are also included, and the book culminates with a review of interesting and novel applications that implement DUIs in different scenarios.

Describes a design process that contains techniques (such as usability requirement specification, task modelling, object modelling, style guide definition, GUI design, prototyping, and valuation) integrated together into a coherent framework. This is intended for professional software developers.

The truly world-wide reach of the Web has brought with it a new realisation of the enormous importance of usability and user interface design. In the last ten years, much has become understood about what works in search interfaces from a usability perspective, and what does not. Researchers and practitioners have developed a wide range of innovative interface ideas, but only the most broadly acceptable make their way into major web search engines. This book summarizes these developments, presenting the state of the art of search interface design, both in academic research and in deployment in commercial systems. Many books describe the algorithms behind search engines and information retrieval systems, but the unique focus of this book is specifically on the user interface. It will be welcomed by industry professionals who design systems that use search interfaces as well as graduate students and academic researchers who investigate information systems.

User Interface Inspection Methods succinctly covers five inspection methods: heuristic evaluation, perspective-based user interface inspection, cognitive walkthrough, pluralistic walkthrough, and formal usability inspections. Heuristic evaluation is perhaps the best-known inspection method, requiring a group of evaluators to review a product against a set of general principles. The perspective-based user interface inspection is based on the principle that different perspectives will find different problems in a user interface. In the related persona-based inspection, colleagues assume the roles of personas and review the product based on the needs, background, tasks, and pain points of the different personas. The cognitive walkthrough focuses on ease of learning. Most of the inspection methods do not require users; the main exception is the pluralistic walkthrough, in which a user is invited to provide feedback while members of a product team listen, observe the user, and ask questions. After reading this book, you will be able to use these UI inspection methods with confidence and certainty.

This book provides a variety of answers in its description and discussion of new, sometimes radical approaches to `usability evaluation', now an increasingly common business tool. It contains new thinking of the subject of usability evaluation in industry. Contributions come from those involved in the practice of industry-based usability evaluation

This book proposes a combination of cognitive modeling with model-based user interface development to tackle the problem of maintaining the usability of applications that target several device types at once (e.g., desktop PC, smart phone, smart TV). Model-based applications provide interesting meta-information about the elements of the user interface (UI) that are accessible through computational introspection. Cognitive user models can capitalize on this meta-information to provide improved predictions of the interaction behavior of future human users of applications under development. In order to achieve this, cognitive processes that link UI properties to usability aspects like effectiveness (user error) and efficiency (task completion time) are established empirically, are explained through cognitive modeling, and are validated in the course of this treatise. In the case of user error, the book develops an extended model of sequential action control based on the Memory for Goals theory and it is confirmed in different behavioral domains and experimental paradigms. This new model of user cognition and behavior is implemented using the MeMo workbench and integrated with the model-based application framework MASP in order to provide automated usability predictions from early software development stages on. Finally, the validity of the resulting integrated system is confirmed by empirical data from a new application, eliciting unexpected behavioral patterns.

This three volume set provides the complete proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction held August, 2001 in New Orleans. A total of 2,738 individuals from industry, academia, research institutes, and governmental agencies from 37 countries submitted their work for presentation at the conference. The papers address the latest research and application in the human aspects of design and use of computing systems. Those accepted for presentation thoroughly cover the entire field of human-computer interaction, including the cognitive, social, ergonomic, and health aspects of work with computers. The papers also address major advances in knowledge and effective use of computers in a variety of diversified application areas, including offices, financial institutions, manufacturing, electronic publishing, construction, and health care.