Reflections on art, photography, philosophy, design, and technology
The following article at UXmatters discusses the application of color theory to interface and web design,
Applying Color Theory to Digital Displays By Pabini Gabriel-Petit, January 20, 2007. The article is the third in the series, part I and II are available in the archive.
[Photomedia Forum post by T.Neugebauer from Jan 25, 2007 ]
Jonathan Follett’s recent article in UXMatters, Seeing the World in Symbols: Icons and the Evolving Language of Digital Wayfinding covers the history of icon design with links to important resources such as the AIGA universal graphic system and the icon archive at GUIdebook: Graphic User Interface gallery.
| “ In Steve Caplin’s book Icon Design, Susan Kare, the artist who created the icons for the original Mac desktop and applications said:“In general, I believe that icons should work a bit like traffic signs; they should convey information without distracting the user, without competing with the data in an application. Ideally, they should suggest something about the functionality. If it is not completely evident, then the function should be easy to remember if the user is told only once.” […] Today, two decades after their advent, icons unnecessarily clutter the desktops of new computers and the toolbars of applications. Increasingly, rather than performing a user-centered wayfinding function, they instead serve a corporate-centered branding function, with application icons becoming tiny billboards for Microsoft®, Adobe®, and their fellow competitors. We’ve turned our virtual spaces into the visual equivalent of the Vegas strip, but without the fun. If the primary purpose of an icon is to appropriately represent an action and help a person accomplish a task quickly, as this visual clutter increases, icons are increasingly failing at that task. source: Seeing the World in Symbols: Icons and the Evolving Language of Digital Wayfinding. UXMatters, December 18, 2006 |
In addition to this, there are the following ISO standards for icons
ISO/IEC 11581:2000 Information technology — User system interfaces and symbols — Icon symbols and functions —
ISO/IEC 18035:2003 Information technology — Icon symbols and functions for controlling multimedia software applications
ISO/IEC 18036:2003 Information technology — Icon symbols and functions for World Wide Web browser toolbars
ISO/IEC TR 19764:2005 Information technology — Guidelines, methodology and reference criteria for cultural and linguistic adaptability in information technology products
ISO/IEC 24738:2006 Information technology — Icon symbols and functions for multimedia link attributes
[Edited from Photomedia Forum post by T.Neugebauer from Dec 2006]
‘Information Design’ also known as “Information Architecture” (IA) and many other names, but we already knew from Gottlob Frege that a symbol can denote many senses…
The first book on Information Design that I read was this book, published in 2000:
Information Design
edited by Robert Jacobson.
I saw it at the MIT bookstore, and couldn’t resist…
One of the first online journals about usability is Boxes and Arrows, and I had the opportunity to attend a presentation and meet its founder Christina Wodtke…I think she was one of the founders of Information Architecture Institute… the presentation consisted largely of a film featuring interviews with various ‘information architects’…
the opportunity was partly the result of the recent IA Summit which just happened to take place in Montreal… one of the interesting applications
discussed at the summit was Flickr Photo Sharing…
Christina published a book on IA in 2002
Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web 
Information design and information architecture is interesting to me, although it is a little bit like ‘informatics’, the meaning of this seems to be continually redefined with subtle nuances. the following list of disciplines are closely related:
I suppose the inter-disciplinary nature of information makes it difficult to label…
I just run across this article, and thought it was an interesting parallel between architecture and information architecture… i always thought that these have a lot in common…
We Are All Connected: The Path from Architecture to Information Architecture, by Fu-Tien Chiou
For architectures of large scale websites there is
Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites
wirtten by Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville. This 2nd edition was published in 2002.
Peter Morville published a new book on IA in 2005:
Ambient Findability
You can read an interview with Peter Morville in Boxes and Arrows by Liz Danzico
Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design
by Jenifer Tidwell, the book site (http://designinginterfaces.com/) offers a good summary of the contents. Jenifer Tidwell first presented a UI pattern language.
[Edited from Photomedia Forum post by T.Neugebauer from April 18, 2005 – November 18, 2006]
I have been reading about user-centered design for years, and find that the amount of web sites and sources about the subject is overwhelming. There are some key developments in the field that can get buried under all that information, such as the existence of relevant ISO standards:
ISO 13407 – Human-centered design processes for interactive systems (1999)
ISO 9241 (part 11) – Ergonomic requirements for office work with visual display terminals (VDTs) : Guidance on usability (1998)
The Human Factors Research Group (HFRG) at University College Cork (Ireland) has a good introduction to ISO 13407. Jurek Kirakowski, director of HFRG also wrote Using ISO 13407 as a guide to personal knowledge and competence.
“  ” |
ISO 9241 (part 11) defines usability as
| “Usability The effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction with which specified users achieve specified goals in particular environments.Effectiveness The accuracy and completeness with which specified users can achieve specified goals in particular environments.Efficiency The resources expended in relation to the accuracy and completeness of goals achieved.Satisfaction The comfort and acceptability of the work system to its users and other people affected by its use. ” |
see also:
usabilitynet.org – ISO 13407
usabilitynet.org – International standards for HCI and usability
some more interesting articles on usability:
Web-Based User Interface Evaluation with Questionnaires by Gary Perlman
Usability measurement in context (PDF) by
Nigel Bevan and Miles Macleod (Behaviour and Information Technology, 13, 132-145 (1994), National Physical Laboratory, Teddington, Middlesex, UK) In this study, the profile of perceived usability was subdivided into 5 subscales: Affect, Efficiency, Helpfulness, Control, and Learnability.
| “From a user’s perspective, the time he or she spends carrying out the task, or the effort required to complete the task are the resources he or she consumes. These two types of resources produce two different definitions of efficiency:Temporal Efficiency = Task Time = Effectiveness Human Efficiency = Effort (e.g.: cognitive workload) = EffectivenessFrom the point of view of the organisation employing the user, the resource consumed is the cost to the organisation of the user carrying out the task, for instance:¥ The labour costs of the user’s time ¥ The cost of the resources and the equipment used ¥ The cost of any training required by the user In this case, efficiency can be stated as: […] Measures of satisfaction describe the perceived usability of the overall system by its |
Current practice in measuring usability: Challenges to usability studies and research by Kasper Hornbæk
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
Volume 64, Issue 2, February 2006, Pages 79-102
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2005.06.002
open access version: http://www.cs.chalmers.se/idc/ituniv/kurser/09/hcd/literatures/Hornbaek%202006%20usability%20measurement%20methods.pdf
[Edited from Photomedia Forum post by T.Neugebauer from Sep 22, 2006 ]