GUIs are one of the important areas in most of the software products. I would like to know whether there is something called GUI Standards that defines the best practices in GUI design, but in depth. As an example are there any definitions that contain the best size for a text box or the ratio between the width and hight of a Windows form. (Just to provide maximum ease to the user + best appearance)
While searching I found several articles: GUI Standards
But they seem to be some "Local" standards defined by some organization only for themselves. Do we have something more common/published than this?
I know there is a standard from Microsoft as well.. But it is just what they do. Not a practices list for best appearance\usability\user experience.
Look for platform-specific user interface design guides. Microsoft has one, as does Apple and even GNOME.
Things like this are quite "cultural", i.e. they change when you move between different operating systems and so on.
I don't think there is any GUI standard, but for sure there are some good GUI practices.
This article seems helpful
Principles of Good GUI Design
I found a similar SO question also
Best Practices & Principles for GUI design
Take a look at the User Experience Patterns (UX Patterns), by Infragistics. It's a nice source of inspiration.
I suggest this post : Best Practices & Principles for GUI design
Also, in google search, use "usability".
I also read a good book about it. But sorry, it is in French :-(
Use your users as a standard. What works best for them is what is best, so talk to them, show them prototypes and use their feedback as input to the final product.
Have a look at Jakob Nielsen's Website for a wealth of usability material.
Depends what you're doing. Nearly every platform has their own official and usually a few unofficial ones.
That's the beauty of standards if you
don't like it pick another one
. However GUI is not easy to standardise as there are multiple IO mechanisms - visual, non visual, one way, interactive etc.
No one standard could fit all - except perhaps and ISO or another standards body and that as we know will be obsolete before it's even completed a first draft.
On the other hand there are various psychologically based user experience techniques that are slowly becoming de rigeur standards.
Both Microsoft and Apple have had GUI standards for more than 20 years.
For instance expressed in the books "The Windows Interface. An Application Design Guide" (1987, ISBN 1-55615-439-9) and "Human Interface Guidelines: The Apple Desktop Interface" (1987, ISBN 0-201-17753-6). This information is also online.
The Windows User Experience Interaction Guidelines might be what you're looking for...
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa511258.aspx
windows is originaly based on CUA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access
although microsoft has gone bananas since Vista, one example is the exchanged order of Edit and View menu commands in the calculator.
Related
Currently I am preparing exercises about networks and mobile communications for students. I was thinking about creating an interactive user-interface which enables the user to drag&drop predefined elements and then implement a logic based upon element distances etc.
An example would be to place two base stations (a predefined element with several properties), set the scale in the interface and then check the signal interferrence in the environment (user-interface).
The first part might be too abstract whereas the example might be too specific, but I was wondering whether there already exists any friendly framework or language which enables developers to create interactive interfaces (for teaching/learning purpouses) in short ammount of time. Usually I write applications for PC environment in .NET but in this case it would take too much time to create a specific interface for every exercise.
I would appreciate if anyone could suggest any way to create interactive user-interface in short ammount of time. Are there any special programming languages or development tools for this kind of applications or are there any useful frameworks for .NET, Java or any other language to speed up the development of user-interfaces?
Thank you!
Perhaps sketchflow could be of interest
although more intended as a tool for mocking up GUI's. It does also have the ability to hook up behaviours and other short snippets of code to your testgui.
Take a look at Mockingbird. I'm not sure if it's exactly what you are looking for, but it is a pretty sweet web application and works well for the development of UIs (at least the wireframes).
There are lots of tools for this purpose -- but most of them only work well if your user interface follows one of a few fairly well-defined (and widely used) patterns. Just for example, if you're creating a database front-end, there are quite a few tools to make the job quite easy.
One often-overlooked tool for this kind of job is Visio. Visio is normally thought of primarily for drawing and diagramming, but you can also attach behaviors to objects so double-clicking an object can run a macro of your choice, opening forms, doing calculations, etc. The macros are (at least normally) written in VBA, which probably isn't the greatest choice for big projects, but as you said, for a situation like this you're mostly interested in short snippets.
There are, of course, a number of downsides to this, such as the inability (at least AFAIK) to deploy such a diagram as a web-based application. Like Henry Ford's "they can have any color they want as long as it's black", you can respond to any user action you want as long as it's a double-click.
Microsoft expression blend might bee something cool too
http://www.microsoft.com/france/expression/default.aspx
I'm looking to find any articles/books on usability. I'd like to get a handle on best practices when designing a UI, this can be anything from which user controls are more intuitive to a new user, to how to phrase text that is displayed to the user to avoid confusing dialogs. I mainly do Windows desktop applications, but most usability standards, I assume, would stand true regardless of the platform.
As an example, here's an MSDN article about the Windows User Experience Guidelines:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa511258.aspx
Try reading this book: Don't Make Me Think. While it's focused on web usability it is applicable to all facets of UI design.
The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman is a standard book on general usability considerations that can be applied to just about everything in day-to-day life. It's not specifically about software, but it's worth it to read it.
Universal Principles of Design is a recommended textbook for my university's Engineering Methods of Software Usability course. Myself, and others who have taken this course, have found this book to be more useful than the required textbook. There appears to be an updated version, called Universal Principles of Design, Revised and Updated: 125 Ways to Enhance Usability, Influence Perception, Increase Appeal, Make Better Design Decisions, and Teach through Design, but I can't speak about that one.
Designing for People Who Have Better Things To Do With Their Lives
by Joel Spolsky (one of the guys behind this site)
when designing UI, please do consider accessibility as well. it's mostly relevant for web sites, but could also be applicable for rich client (desktop apps).
so, these links has a lot of info on the subject, though it's not pure usability info.
a good resource on usability and accessibility:
Design Guidelines for Electronic Publications, Multimedia and the Web
you might find this check list useful:
Checklist of Checkpoints for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0
and also this tool that will check your web site accessibility:
web aim
Designing Interfaces by Jenifer Tidwell is pretty good.
Well, a long-standing favorite specifically for user interface design is Alan Cooper's About Face. It should touch most important topics when designing Windows desktop applications.
Then there are also various UX patterns which are well-presented in Quince (needs Silverlight).
Jef Raskin's The Humane Interface is also rather good, but very radical in his ideas. Still, this book points out many fallacies in modern UI design. If you need to stick to the WIMP world, then following his suggestions might be a little hard as he tends to suggest to overthrow everything we're used to. But well-written and good for provoking thoughts, even if you don't follow all his advice.
As for books/articles on usability in general or on slightly different topics:
Jakob Nielsen's website useit.com. While not particularly fancy-designed it is a trove of thoughts and advice on usability in general.
Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think. Web usability, but also a very good read.
Donald Norman's The Design of Everyday Things. Usability in general and has many pointers on how to think about usability without going into specific technologies. It's applicable to desktop application usability anyway, though.
Regarding articles, try Boxes and Arrows
Designing Visual Interfaces by Mullet and Sano provides a great foundation for different layout-related issues. Not a book on usability per se but still relevant, I'd say.
As for web resources, try:
useit.com: Jakob Nielsen's Website
Usable Web
A List Apart on usability
For book inspiration, see Suggested Readings in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), User Interface (UI) Development, & Human Factors (HF) (and all the great answers in this thread).
My favorite usability blog contains very well-constructed, insightful and thoughtful posts, by David Hamill.
You can find his blog at goodusability.co.uk
Enjoy.
I read articles from http://ui-patterns.com/ and http://www.uxbooth.com/. Those have been helpful for me.
I would like to second uxbooth.com - we recently had an article published there which might be what you are looking for - check it out at http://www.uxbooth.com/blog/usability-testing-dont-guess-test/
usefulusability.com
is another good site, they regularly have good articles up there.
Oh, and another article we had published recently:
www.1stwebdesigner.com/development/usability-ux-pitfalls-howto-avoid/
I think this one provides some pretty good examples of issues that frequently pop up, and how to avoid them.
And if you are looking to run a simple usability test, what not check us out at IntuitionHQ.com
Good luck!
I really want to create a stunning-looking GUI desktop application that looks like, for example:
Mac OS X interface
Picasa desktop client on windows
IPhone apps
Office 2007
I've mostly been programming GUI using Qt/Swing/WinForm
and I'm tired of creating so plain looking GUI, lol.
So I was thinking about diving into stuff like:
jQuery
WPF/C#
iPhone SDK
Silverlight
Adobe Air/Flex
Just to get some ideas on how to create really cool looking UI.
Does that sound like a good list? Any developers here that could share what platform they use to create very cool looking desktop app?
On a sidenote, I really wonder what developers at Apple / Microsoft use to develop their own cool-looking software.
EDIT
A lot of responses talk about the importance of usability over "cool-looking"..
I totally agree that usability and simplicity are the most important aspects of user interface design. I've been doing GUI development for a while now (> 3 years), so that I understand.
But using cool-looking UI also improves user experience + it could make big difference on whether or not your software sells.
I mean, otherwise why would Microsoft/Apple try to make their OS UI look "cooler" everytime there's a new version? Why would websites like pragprog.com, or versionsapp.com. make their websites look like that? Basically you kill 2 birds with one stone: stunnning-looking UI + super usability (because it looks simple and intuitive).
That is what I'm striving for. And as far as I know, I cannot achieve that using Qt/Winform. Most of the books I have read just show you how to make average-looking (read: 1990's) UI. I want to learn how to create cool-looking UI. And the only place I see cool-looking UIs these days are the technology I list above. I'm not enamored with any technology; but I just want to know how things are done in other technology to see if I could apply them to the technology I'm using, or see if I could use those technology in my line of work.
An example: if I were to pick between this UI and this UI, I probably would pick the latter, if just based on looks alone.
Functionally, they are just the same UI; they both allow you to keep track of your time. They both contain buttons and textboxes, etc. But the fact that they look different, also differentiate them in terms of attractiveness.
So in all, I think the "ice on the cake" is very important. I would say it's the thing you strive for after you are certain you have a totally intuitive, usable UI.
I think that the major reason many people suck at designing interfaces is that they consider them to be graphic design. It is not. The core of creating a good user interface is a bit like creating a good API – the interface has to be conceptually consistent, hard to misuse, easy for common tasks.
Wanting to design something cool because you are “tired of plain GUI” is a perfect recipe for disaster. If for nothing else then because consistency is a crucial part of a good UI. If each application wanted to stay out of the crowd, the whole thing would be an unusable mess.
It is almost unfortunate that Mac OS X looks that good, because then people start to think you can create a good interface by animating it or sprinkling some graphics on the top of it. The graphical part, the “cool” of the design is just the icing on the cake. If you really want to design good interfaces, stay true to the environment, respect local human interface guidelines. And maybe read Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines to get a feeling where the problems are and what can be done to solve them.
I know this sounds much more boring than filling gradients in Photoshop, but it’s the only right approach to take if you really want to create a top-notch interface.
the key to a stunning graphical user interface is twofold:
it still has to be useful to the users, and that involves a lot of hard work, study, paper prototypes, user interviews, usability testing, et al.
hire a really really good graphic artist
Neither step is optional. If you -the programmer- also happen to be a really good graphic artist, that's fine - but the vast majority are not, and no amount of fancy tools and photoshop tutorials will replace the talent and training that real artists bring to the table.
I don't mean to sound harsh, but most programmers are terrible GUI designers. Myself included. It's ok to leave art to the pros. ;-)
I'm all for WPF/Silverlight, but it really about the platform that you need to support.
The real deal is your own talent, as WPF is a powerful tool, if you ain't got the talent to use it, it will look like improved winforms. (Also check out the Expression Studio from MS - which enhance what you can get out of WPF).
If you want to know more about UI you can read this books:
About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design
The Inmates Are Running the Asylum
UI development is not about technologies. In some cases console is the best solution.
We can get commercial GUI add-ons like Telerik which also supports Mono as well.
Regardless of the UI technology, you will of course be well-served to adopt a programming style where the look and logic of the app are as decoupled as possible. This allows you maximal flexibility to design and evolve the look of your application (the View) while potentially requiring very few code changes in the back-end (the Model or ViewModel).
While possible using all UI technologies, it's particularly easy to execute this in the case of WPF/Silverlight/Moonlight via the MVVM programming style, due to the succinctness of databinding (very little boilerplate "glue" code).
Many applications are let down by the quality of the 'writing' in their user interfaces: typically, poor spelling, grammar, inconsistent tone, and worse yet, "humour" are the usual offenders.
Are there good resources that can help developers to write UI messages that give a professional and positive impression to your customers, even when your code's going to hell in a handcart?
Thanks, all — Some great resources here, so I will CW this question. I'm accepting Adam Sill's answer because it's the one that (as a developer of desktop apps) I found most pertinent.
Since XP, I've been a fan of the Windows UX Guidelines sections that cover how to properly structure text (how to ask questions, how to make assertions in dialogs, etc).
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa974176.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa974175.aspx
Read The Elements of Style. Then re-read it.
Also, anytime you are working with a program or website make a conscious effort to notice how they choose to do their writing. Imitate those you like.
The resources found at Writing for the Web might be useful to you.
The best tool for this is called "primary education". Many developers seem to have missed this, and I don't know how to fix that problem.
Also, this may be a British thing, but I think you mean "humor" and "going to Hell in a handbasket". :)
This book has a lot of good advice:
GUI Bloopers 2.0
Short version:
Be consistent throughout your application or app suite. Don't call the same feature two different names, even if they're in different dialogs, etc. Develop a product lexicon that everyone references.
Use the same terms that people who use your software use (i.e. users don't refer to themselves as users).
Don't call two different things by the same name.
Put all of the messages displayed to the user in a central place (i.e. a resources file of some kind). This makes it easy to review all of the messages for spelling, tone, consistency, and whatever else you want to check.
Usability test your software to see if the messages make sense and people can use your software easily. If they can't, change the resources file and test it again.
I would suggest showing your UI to as many people as you can--preferably people who read a lot (Just because reading does wonders for your grammar and vocabulary).
Getting something out that people can examine, however, is awesome--even if it's just a demo of the GUI.
If you work at a company, get to know your QA and Tech Support people. They are usually really wonderful once they understand what you are trying to do--they will review your UI, give you input on text and usability as well as possibly new requirements nobody in engineering would come up with.
If you work on your own, try to find a potential customer or two to review your UI. Ask them to pay attention to the text...
The more eyes, the better. You might even ask your parents, wife or other family. What can it hurt?
Get your application's texts proofread by someone who does just that for a living. Then the UI walked through by someone who does usability for a living. Neither of these two people should have been involved in the development.
It's the only way to make sure.
I've been asked to research what the best practices are when building the international version of your site.
The main question being asked of me is how we handle Chinese and Arabic.
For example, when the user selects Arabic as a language, should only text be right aligned or should our nav, logo and general layout also switch around?
When comparing to other large corporations, Apple and IBM don't change their layout but Microsoft switches almost everything around.
My good friend Google hasn't been much help so I was hoping someone here could help me out. Does anybody have answers? Some tips and/or resources?
This is a very broad topic, but you did mention that Microsoft "switches everything around," so I'll talk a little about that.
There are a few components to supporting many cultures with your application. Some of the considerations might be:
According to the W3C, internationalization refers to preparing your application for other cultures by removing hard-coded strings and making other kinds of resources, like images, localizable. This should be part of your software design/build/test process from the beginning.
Localization can be broken down into two specific areas:
Language localization is the focus of most international software. Strings and images are converted to another language and loaded dynamically using the current culture.
Cultural localization (something for which Microsoft is famous) is the practice of changing UI elements to better-fit other cultures. For example, in the US, red implies an error or unfavorable message. In other countries, this is not always the case.
For software to genuinely be cross-cultural, you need to address both types of localization. For your web site, though, it's probably sufficient to localize the language strings and images as appropriate; you probably don't have the resources to have user interaction designers working on laying out your application for different cultures.
As ever in UI design, "it depends."
In this case the things you want to check include:
What kind of users are you expecting? What technical level?
What Web experience are they used to?
What resources do you have for the localisation?
Technical users (e.g. developers) will most likely prefer the same layout on the site as other content.
For Arabic, while Web-savvy users are reasonably familar with left-to-right usage, it feels "wrong" and so your site will need to be quite compelling to make sure people stay. If you can change your layout then do.
For both Arabic and Chinese there are many customs and idioms that are quite different, especially when it comes to graphic design. Popular sites in particular look much "noisier" than is usual in the West: a site like stackoverflow.com would be very minimalist in these cultures.
Similarly be careful with things like lucky and unlucky numbers, colours with traditional associations, and suchlike. (This naturally goes everywhere: I could mention the comments we had from Northern Ireland about a very orange-branded theme that was once chosen for a site I worked on...)
What I'd recommend is that you allocate some of your translation budget to a local native-speaking UI consultant. They'd be able to give you proper advice on what bits of your site need to be localised as well as translated.
This guy has a raft of information. Beyond that, my problem is that I'm used to helping people do this via a multi-day consultation, and I'm not sure how to summarize into a post that fits here. That really isn't our business any more, so, honestly, I'm not shilling for work.