Software can be designed to simplify tasks and to create a positive overall experience for users. Thoroughly understanding the goals of users and stakeholders and designing software with those goals in mind are the best approaches to successfully delivering products that will delight customers. Read more – ‘IBM’s Design Principles’.
The ‘feel’ of an interactive system can be compared to the impressions generated by a piece of music. Both can only be experienced over a period of time. With either, the user must abstract the structure of the system from a sequence of details. Each may have a quality of ‘naturalness’ because successive actions follow a logically self-consistent pattern. A good composer can write a new pattern which will seem, after a few listenings, to be so natural the observer wonders why it was never done before. Read more – ‘Hansen’s User Engineering Principles for Interactive Systems’.
Human-Computer Interaction Seminar (Seminar on People, Computers, and Design) is a Stanford University course that features weekly speakers on topics related to human-computer interaction design. The seminar is organized by the Stanford HCI Group, which works across disciplines to understand the intersection between humans and computers. Read more – ‘Stanford University Human-Computer Interaction Seminars’.
Published in the "Ergonomics in Design" journal in 1997, Arnie Lund collected and created this list of 34 rules-of-thumb that were found particularly useful during the design process by colleagues working in the human-computer interaction (HCI) design field. Read more – ‘Lund's Expert Ratings of Usability Maxims’.
Personas are fictional characters created to represent the different user types within a targeted demographic that might use a site or product. Personas are useful in considering the goals, desires, and limitations of the users in order to help to guide decisions about a product, such as features, interactions, and visual design. Personas are most often used as part of a user-centered design process for designing software and are also considered a part of interaction design. Read more – ‘Ten Steps to Personas’.
