I've been searching online to which library to use, If there's any difference, maybe one is better for perfomance but offers fewer options.
I've found some information but didn't go deep into these questions. Can someone tell me if there's any difference between them? Or which one would you recomend?
Related
I am a UI/UX designer. Currently I got interviewed for a post and now they’ve given me an Exercise where I am supposed to do a complete UI review/Audit/Analysis of their product. I need some suggestions to do the exercise:
What medium do you think is best for presenting such a review? A video, An audio with visuals, or a document highlighting issues in UI with callouts?
What are the key points that need to be covered in such a review?
So that I submit the best exercise and get selected. Thanks in advance.
First of all you should know that UI/UX is not my area of expertise. But I've been directly or indirectly involved with it enough to know that it's not an exact science. People will often debate about what is the best for the user. Just remember that two users themselves might not agree on something.
So what I think is important is that you genuinely take the role of a user, try using the product imagining a scenario where you want to accomplish something. If you do it right, you should have some feedback on what works well and what could be improved. It's your opinion, the important part is that you can back them up with common sense or valid arguments.
As for the medium, I'd say that you should choose the one that communicates your views the best. I'd rather read through well organized text than go through a poor video. You'd probably want to impress, so whatever you choose, do it well! If the UX design was documented upfront, you would normally use that as the basis for your review. So look up UX design tools, you might be able to use one of them.
If you have time, a background in UML modeling might be helpful, particularly the ICONIX methodology, which encourages exploring different "what if" scenarios, rather than just desiging for the standard (most common) path. Also assuming that you've already looked up online resources describing common best practices.
This idea just popped into my head, so I don't have any code to show for it, but I was curious to know the answer. How is spell check implemented on most major word processors? I'm most curious to know what kind of data structures would be used in the creation of such a utility. Also, references to algorithms would be nice answers as well.
For a basic guide in python, have a look here.
Also you might want to look at this past question
I am looking for an algorithm visualization library/tool that is well documented and you can call from your source code.
I took a look at jhave - example of usage. And I liked it, it seems it has some documentation but I do not trust its future.
I found this article about Algorithm explorer it has a nice idea. It is implemented as a c++ api but I cannot find it anywere.
My main idea is that I want to do some unit tests for the brain.
So I construct various exercises and in future when I want to test my knowledge I redo them.
I found that images stick longer with me, so that is why I want to visualize algorithms in certain states. ( I might remember better a tricky case like what happens when data is sorted in reverse and I use quick sort if I view it.)
An ideal tool:
1. Has to integrate with any language.
2. Has to be well documented with a growing comunity and examples.
3. Be implemented on top of a capable rendering engine(ogre, xna).
Here is the place you need to visit: The Algorithm Visualization Portal!
I have tried to be disciplined about decomposing into small reusable methods when possible. As the project growing, I am re-implementing the exact same method.
I would like to know how to deal with this in an automated way. I am not looking for an IDE specific solution. Dependency on method names may not be sufficient. Unix and scripting are solutions that would be extremely beneficial. Answers such as "take care" etc. are not the solutions I am seeking.
I think the cheapest solution to implement might be to use Google Desktop. A more accurate solution would probably be much harder to implement - treat your code base as a collection of documents where the identifiers (or tokens in the identifiers) are words of the document, and then use document clustering techniques to find the closest matching code to a query. I'm aware of some research similar to that, but nothing close to out-of-the-box code that you could use. You might try looking on Google Code Search for something. I don't think they offer a desktop version, but you might be able to find some applicable code you can adapt.
Edit: And here's a list of somebody's favorite code search engines. I don't know whether any are adaptable for local use.
Edit2: Source Code Search Engine is mentioned in the comments following the list of code search engines. It appears to be a commercial product (with a free evaluation version) that is intended to be used for searching local code.
I'm a recent graduate who is looking to get a job doing user experience. Next week, I have a technical interview in which I will be given a website and will have to talk about its usability issues as well as come up with ways of improving the user experience. I feel I have the natural skills to do this and have been doing a fair amount of reading into the subject, but I would like some further advice on how to effectively critique different kinds of websites.
Does anybody have any suggestions of common faults I should look out for, or advice on ways of structuring my evaluation in order that it is relatively air-tight and I do not miss anything obvious?
As I've said before, I'm already doing a lot of reading and I realize that practice makes perfect. However, I'm hopeful that those that have long-term experience with this can help me by imparting their wisdom on gotchas, common issues, and what to look out for in a good/bad website.
Thanks in advance!
How easy navigation is
Whether a user can easily find what he needs without resorting to "search" function. Edge case: whether a user can find the search input field without using the browser's search function (Ctrl+F)?
Whether a site is browsable with images turned off
How many clicks it takes to accomplish an operation. Is that many really necessary?
Are the most important / frequently used features right there in front of the user?
Whether you communicate with the user in geek language
Whether you overwhelm the user with long literary texts where one or two words will suffice
Whether you use standard ideas in your UI. Do buttons, links and menus look like buttons, links and menus? Do they also work that way?
If UI is made up of a limited set of controls with consistent look and behavior? Or each page is unique and has to be learned from scratch?
Whether UI is accomplished with mostly 2-3 colors or uses different colors everywhere to look cool
Also check out the following questions:
Worst UI You’ve Ever Used
What are common UI misconceptions and annoyances?
Why is good UI design so hard for some Developers?
What is the best UI you’ve ever used?
As the other answers have talked a bit about usability I'll mention some things about accessibility (although good accessibility and usability go hand-in-hand).
First of all you need to get the usability correct - a site with poor usability will straight away mean that it will almost certainly also have poor accessibility. Make sure it makes sense, is easy to navigate and is structured meaningfully - for good accessibility that needs to be reflected in the markup as well as visually (so use headings correctly, use things like (strong) instead of (b)old, etc). Automated tools can provide some limited help with this.
Secondly make sure you use the various pieces of markup that are available which will enhance usability (e.g. alt tags on images). Automated tools are excellent for this.
Next if you're going to use technologies like javascript try to use progressive enhancement so that users without those technologies available still have a workable experience. Automated tools won't help much with this.
Finally don't get lured into thinking that an accessible website is a dull boring featureless one - for every user with visual difficulties there will be many more who have cognitive difficulties such as dyslexia. The aim is to make it engaging for everyone, not cripple it for a minority of users (who will likely also be penalised if you start slashing content - for example youtube is one of the most popular sites for blind users).
My thinking process :
See what's different. I mean ask yourself, "is this button here also done that way on youtube/google/basecamp/whatever has been proven good enought".
If it's not the case, I ask myself "does it make sense to do it differently?". If it doesn't make sense, then it shouldn't be that way to avoid confusing the user.
If it makes sense, I ask myself "If it's not obvious, what's the learning curve for the user?", always keeping in mind that "the user" is not IT.
Then I'd see if I can improve it. If I can't, maybe you can't improve it, so even if the control is not perfect it's good enough.
Finally ask yourself "what does the website wants the user to do?". Is it buying something? Subscribing? It's all about figuring out what's the objective. Then see if the website is oriented toward something aiming to complete this objective.
As well as practical ideas about usability problems, you might want to think what kind of process you'd use to do this work (and how it would fit into the company's development process). Would you start out with research? How would you present your analysis and feedback?