HCI basic concepts
From Inforail
It is expected that everyone who joins the lab is familiar with these concepts:
- HIG - a set of guidelines for designing interfaces for a specific platform. It is highly recommended that you read them, or at least look at the pictures ;-)
- Learning curve
- Fitts' law
- Formula explained
- On the screen - observe how fine-tuning must be applied when the cursor reaches small objects
- Real world objects - see how this works with real-world objects, not just widgets on a screen
- Neat summary - an article that summarizes what there is to know about this law
- Information overload
- Information overload is real - an overview of simple methods to reduce information overload
- F-pattern applied when examining the contents of web-pages (and most likely other documents too)
- Accessibility - something that makes the system usable by people with disabilities (poor vision, motor control issues, etc)
TODO
- Forgiving interfaces - do not punish people for making mistakes
- Provide an option to undo an action
- Tolerate malformed input
- Progressive disclosure
- Perceived response time is more important than actual response time
- Consistency
- within the UI itself
- with the environment in which the system runs
- User model vs actual model
- Reasonable default values
- Disrupting focus
- Wording error messages
- Visualization and how it influences perception
- The write right rite - tweaking visualization in order to optimize learning and memory skills