Month: May 2008

Goal-Directed Design (Cooper)

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    Goal-Directed Design is a powerful tool for answering the most important questions that crop up during the definition and design of a digital product:

  • Who are my users?
  • What are my users trying to accomplish?
  • How do my users think about what they’re trying to accomplish?
  • How should my product behave?
  • What form should my product take?
  • How will users interact with my product?
  • How can my product’s functions be most efficiently organized?
  • How will my product introduce itself to first-time users?
  • How can my product put an understandable, appealing, and controllable face on technology?
  • How can my product deal with problems that users encounter?
  • How will my product help infrequent and inexperienced users understand how to accomplish their goals?
  • How can my product provide sufficient depth and power for expert users?

From Alan Cooper’s (et.al.) book About Face 3 – The Essentials of Interaction Design

Milestones of computers as universal home appliances

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  • 1972: IBM introduces 701, a multi-tasking enabled computer
  • 1968: Douglas Engelbart introduces windowed displays, a graphical user interface, networking, hyperlinks, audio and video “conferencing”, dynamic file linking, shared-
    screen collaboration and a mouse.
  • 1973/1984: Development of the Xerox Alto featuring What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) editor, a mouse, a graphical user interface (GUI), and bit-mapped display, menus and
    icons, windows, and Ethernet
  • 1984: The Macintosh indicates a dramatic shift from the notion of computing as specialized work (computational) to computing as used in all work, and finally to computing used in the home.

From Jon Kolko’s book THOUGHTS ON INTERACTION DESIGN (page26-28)

Heuristic evaluation of websites

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According to Nielsen etc., users ignore approximately 80% of the content of a webpage. Doesn’t really surprise, does it?

Scannability of pages becomes more and more essential and is on the top of my list for heuristic evaluations. Other key criteria: orientation, consistency, relevance, and controllability.

    Where am I, what do I get?

  • Site ID
  • Communication of site goal (e.g. in tag line)
    How can I navigate?

  • Signposting: Where am I, where can go, where have I been? (e.g. breadcrumbs)
  • Amount of menus manageable? Competing navigation systems?
  • Categories and subcategories sensible and logically coherent?
  • Consistent labels?
  • search function?
    How do I find my way within the page?

  • Screen real estate: content first?
  • Overall hierarchy apparent and sensible? Visual hierarchy, Headers, subheaders, lists
  • Granularity of content chunks consistent?
  • Makes content sense as a ‘narrative’ or answer to the user’s interest?
  • Visual weight of irrelevant elements (Ads, banners etc.)
    General usability

  • Adheres to conventions for layout, navigation and technical features?
  • Visual cues to support navigation and communication? Links clearly highlighted?
  • User centred approach: personalisation, control of page layout, reflection of user needs?
    General accessibility

  • Standard compliant with W3 standards?
  • Clear structure?
  • HTML syntax?

Page elements

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    Page elements

  • Site ID
  • Page ID
  • Page tag line
  • Global navigation
  • Top level categories
  • Second Level Categories
  • Local navigation
  • Contextual navigation
  • Lead image
  • Lead article
  • Featured link
  • Breadcrumbs
  • Headers
  • Subheaders
  • Lists
  • Images
  • Text
  • AV
  • Feeds
  • Indices
  • Site accessories
  • Search features
  • Footer
  • Footer navigation
  • Disclaimer