Professional Documents
Culture Documents
MDD10 Design Principles
MDD10 Design Principles
Design
Principles
CS2002S: Mobile
Development and Design
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Golden Rules of Design
Strive for consistency
Allow Undo
recap
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Recognition Over Recall
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Knowledge & Chunking
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80/20 Pareto Law
20% of functionality will account for 80% of usage
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Principle of Least Effort
Harold Thimbleby
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Principle of Least Astonishment
Reflect inner workings or user intuition?
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Aesthetic Usability Effect
Things that look better perform better in usability tests!
The attractive product will be perceived as easier to use. Ease of use is often a criteria
in purchase decisions – easy to use products require less training and support. So by
improving the attractiveness it increases the perceived ease of use – improving the
chances of making a sale Users will be more likely to develop positive feelings
towards the attractive product. This can lead to: Positive reviews – leading to more
sales They’ll tell their friends – resulting in more sales leads They’ll tolerate faults
more – reducing support calls The attractive product will be perceived as of higher
quality And, perhaps most importantly; customers may overlook feature deficiencies
so they get to use the more attractive product
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Apparent Usability vs Inherent
Usability
1 2 3 ¥
Main Display
4 5 6 Cancel
7 8 9 Correct
1,000 10,000
Masaaki Kurosu and Kaori Kashimura. 1995. Apparent usability vs. inherent
usability: experimental analysis on the determinants of the apparent usability.
In Conference Companion on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '95)
Melissa Densmore, UCT CSC2002S
These results show that the apparent usability is less correlated with the inherent
usability compared to the apparent beauty… This suggests that the user may be
strongly affected by the aesthetic aspect of the interface even when they try to
evaluate the interface in its functional aspects and it is suggested that the interface
designers should strive not only to improve the inherent usability but also brush up
the apparent usability or the aesthetic aspect of the interface.
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Modes
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Feedback (Harold Thimbleby & Isaac Newton)
◼ Every user action needs the interface to react so that the user
knows the action is complete
◼ this can be tricky in multi-tasking systems
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Equal opportunity
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Fitts’s Law (1954)
æD ö
time = a + b log 2 ç +1÷
èS ø
Melissa Densmore, UCT CSC2002S
Menu design
Buttons and other GUI controls should be a reasonable size; it is relatively difficult to
click on small ones.
Edges and corners of the computer monitor (e.g., the location of the Start button,
Taskbar and a maximized window's Close button in Microsoft Windows; or the menus
and Dock of Mac OS X) are particularly easy to acquire with a mouse, touchpad or
trackball. Because the pointer remains at the screen edge regardless of how much
further the mouse is moved, they can be considered as having infinite width.[6][7] An
exception of note is that since hands are not artificially limited in the same way, this
attribute does not apply to touchscreens.
Similarly, top-of-screen menus (e.g., Mac OS) are sometimes easier to acquire than
top-of-window menus (e.g., Windows OS).
Pop-up menus can usually be opened faster than pull-down menus, since the user
avoids travel: the pop-up appears at the current cursor position.
Pie menu items typically are selected faster and have a lower error rate than linear
menu items, for two reasons: because pie menu items are all the same, small
distance from the centre of the menu; and because their wedge-shaped target areas
(which usually extend to the edge of the screen) are very large.[8]
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Fitts’s Law + Pareto Principle?
Menu design
Buttons and other GUI controls should be a reasonable size; it is relatively difficult to
click on small ones.
Edges and corners of the computer monitor (e.g., the location of the Start button,
Taskbar and a maximized window's Close button in Microsoft Windows; or the menus
and Dock of Mac OS X) are particularly easy to acquire with a mouse, touchpad or
trackball. Because the pointer remains at the screen edge regardless of how much
further the mouse is moved, they can be considered as having infinite width.[6][7] An
exception of note is that since hands are not artificially limited in the same way, this
attribute does not apply to touchscreens.
Similarly, top-of-screen menus (e.g., Mac OS) are sometimes easier to acquire than
top-of-window menus (e.g., Windows OS).
Pop-up menus can usually be opened faster than pull-down menus, since the user
avoids travel: the pop-up appears at the current cursor position.
Pie menu items typically are selected faster and have a lower error rate than linear
menu items, for two reasons: because pie menu items are all the same, small
distance from the centre of the menu; and because their wedge-shaped target areas
(which usually extend to the edge of the screen) are very large.[8]
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Hick’s Law
The time taken to reach a decision goes up
as the number of choices increases
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Signal to Noise Ratio (Tufte)
control vs. functionality
<blink>
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Signal to Noise Ratio (Tufte)
control vs. functionality
◼ Too much density leads to degradation of viewer interest
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Examples: NextBus
How easy is it to spot critical information?
https://www.cultofmac.com/386772/how-to-purge-your-obsolete-apple-watch-
alarms/
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Mobile Design
Lots of Data – on a Small Screen
Ben Shneiderman’s
Visualization Mantra
overview
filter
details on demand
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App Overview
Category views
Detail/edit view
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Text Overview
Gmail does this really well
Filtering - ordering
Exclude data that is not
relevant
Dynamic Ordering
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Recommender Systems
These dynamic categories emerge from crowdsourcing
• Explicit: star ratings, reviews
• Implicit: downloads, views
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Implicit Filtering: Location Based Services
Mobiles can know where they are geographically
Apps (given location data) can tailor results without
having to filter location
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Explicit Filtering Use sliders
and
checkboxes
to specify
ranges and
attributes
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Meeting Planning
Melissa Densmore, UCT CSC2002S
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If you must enter text
Use auto-completion techniques, such as keyword in
context, support voice.
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SMS and Messaging Services
Usefulness | Usability | User Experience
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Mobile Modalities: Maps
Google Skymap
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Head up or Head down?
http://nation.time.com/2013/10/09/san-francisco-commuters-missed-a-murder-by-staring-at-their-phones/
Melissa Densmore, UCT CSC2002S
Image
https://thegrand0ptimist.wordpress.com/2013/03/13/heads-down-phones-up/
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Sygic GPS App
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Virtual Reality - FlashBack
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Facebook
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Instagram
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Vula
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Cape Town Buses and Trains