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User Experience & User- Centered Design

We're big believers in the benefits of user-centered design and a strong user expertience to support learning efforts. Here are a few article to introduce you to the theme, but over time, we'll add some of Marcia's original content on the subject and more websites, books, and resources to help you create strong products and sites. Enjoy.

Articles

If you missed the article ``Getting the Dirt" in The Industry Standard's June 3rd issue, click here to check it out! Drugstore.com's Andy Cargile explains how feedback from Vividence testers helped his team build new features with greater insight, saying, ``We found out the benefits and flaws without blindly following the competition." You should feel proud to be improving the Web and making the news!

Information, Architecture, and Usability Peter Morville. WebReview. Mar. 12, 1999. ``What is the relationship between information architecture design and usability engineering? This is a loaded question, and I wade into dangerous waters by addressing it, but the answer has significant implications for a variety of audiences."

Thought Activated Computing. The cyberpunk vision of a brain-computer interface becomes real�as a boon for the paralyzed by San Witt and Sean Durkin. Salon Magazine. November 1998.

The New Face of Computing: The Windows-style UI is getting a face lift; Web integration is just Step 1. Michael Moeller & Jim Kerstetter. PC Week. June 8, 1998.

Capturing the Power of Design. Scott H. Young from Perception Research Services. ``Given the growing impact of design, from ensuring consideration in a crowded world, to representing brands in new markets and venues, and influencing the many purchase decisions which occur at the point-of-sale, those companies which invest in effective design are sure to be well-rewarded."

Creating the People's Computer: One of the nation's foremost computer scientists, exasperated by the unfriendliness of today's computer systems, suggests what designers can do to make machines serve human needs�rather than the other way around. Michael L. Dertouzos. This article is adapted from the book What Will Be [go to Amazon.com's information on What Will Be]

Does the Right Software a Great Designer Make? Visuals can clarify a point by giving students a picture. Thus, the lesson addresses not only the auditory learner also the visual learner. Linda F. Szul Ph.D., Dawn E. Woodland, Ph.D. THE Journal. February 1998.

Lego-like Assembly Can Make Web Apps a Snap. Eamonn Sullivan. PC Week. January 12, 1998.

The Transparent Interface. Jakob Nielson. New Media. December 15, 1997.

Local Color: From coast to coast, your web site is killing them. In the rest of the world it may be killing business. A few things you should know about hosting a Web site in cultures you don't know. Lynda Radosevich. CIO Web Business. December 1, 1997.

How Usability-Focused Companies Think Tara Scanlon. Eye for Design November/December 1997 ``... the companies that are most successful at designing usable products are those in which everyone actually thinks differently. Their assumptions, their goals, and the way they deal with problems have a different emphasis than those at less-successful companies. This set of beliefs manifests itself in the way they run their business."

Design patterns take cue from architecture. Jack Vaughan. Application Development Trends. November 1997.

The Medium is the Hypertext: Q & A with Dan Bricklin, Trellix Corp. Jack Vaughan. Application Development Trends. October 1997.

Human error and the design of computer systems Donald A. Norman Communications of the ACM, 1990, 33, 4-7. ``In 1988, the Soviet Union's Phobos 1 satellite was lost on its way to Mars. Why? According to Science magazine, `not long after the launch, a ground controller omitted a single letter in a series of digital commands sent to the spacecraft. And by malignant bad luck, that omission caused the code to be mistranslated in such a way as to trigger the test sequence' (the test sequence was stored in ROM, but was intended to be used only during checkout of the spacecraft while on the ground) [7]. Phobos went into a tumble from which it never recovered."

Several design articles by Alan Cooper

Research on maximizing the learning effectiveness of multimedia applications. Lawrence J. Najjar. Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. June 1998. This paper discusses principles of educational multimedia user interface design. The purpose of the principles is to maximize the learning effectiveness of multimedia applications. The principles are based on the results of studies in psychology, computer science, instructional design, and graphics design. The principles help user interface designers make decisions about the learning materials, learners, tasks that the learners perform, and tests for measuring learning performance. Topics discussed in this paper include: 1) The use of pictures and animation and its effect on learning and retention 2) Supportive versus decorative multimedia 3) Synchronizing visual and textual materials 4) How differences in aptitude affect learning 5) Active versus passive processing of information.

Magazines

interactions is a bimonthly magazine about applied human-computer interaction (HCI). Its primary objective is to communicate ideas, standards, practices, research results, and case studies to its readers. Users, developers, designers, managers, researchers, and purchasers interested in HCI will gain access to leading-edge ideas and tools that emerge from research and development, achieving a true technology transfer from R&D settings to the practitioner community.

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