Usability Week 2008
New York
Apr 7-12		 London
May 19-24		 San Francisco
Jun 16-21		 Melbourne
Jul 21-26

Application Usability 1: Page-Level Building Blocks for Feature Design

  • New York: Friday, April 11
  • London: Friday, May 23
  • San Francisco: Friday, June 20
  • Melbourne: Friday, July 25

Chris Nodder
Full-Day Tutorial

The basics of any application are the screen elements that users interact with to make the application do their bidding.

Graphical user interfaces have a rich vocabulary, with design components for many different situations. Each of these building blocks may seem simple, but using them correctly is not that easy and has profound implications for the usability of the overall user experience. There are also many borderline cases where it's difficult to determine how to use the controls correctly.

In this seminar, we’ll explore the behavior of each application screen component, or widget, including both standard behaviors that users expect and novel interface components designed for specific interactions.

What You’ll Learn

In this session, you’ll learn:

  • How people think, and why this impacts the design of screen elements
  • Which screen element (widget) to use in which circumstance
  • How to choose between different widgets that perform similar functions
  • The design patterns that users expect for common tasks
  • The best ways to communicate information back to your users

Course Outline

  • Design primitives: when to use what widgets, and how to use them
    • Selection
      • Menus
      • Hierarchies
      • Choices from long lists
      • Tabs
    • Data entry
      • Form fields
      • Label placement
      • In-line descriptions and assistance
    • Buttons
      • Button behavior
      • Radio buttons and checkboxes
      • Tool bars
      • Command links
    • Manipulation
      • Scroll bars and sliders
      • Multimedia controls
      • Item manipulation controls (handles, frames, rotators)
    • Editing
      • Standard edit controls
      • Selection behaviors
    • Progressive disclosure
      • Expandable areas on the screen
      • Scrolling areas within the screen
    • Grouping
      • Group boxes
      • White space
    • Hybrid controls
      • Menu and split buttons
      • Choosing exactly n options
      • Linked controls
      • Timeline controls
      • Image maps as selectors
    • Notifications
      • Tool tips
      • Balloons
      • System notifications
  • Variations of the standard controls
    • How to handle borderline cases
    • When is it appropriate to “roll your own” controls?
  • Window types: which type to use, and when
    • Kiosk-style, full-screen windows
    • Primary windows
    • Secondary windows
      • Dialogs
      • Alerts
  • Communicating with users
    • Progress indication
    • Communicating errors
  • Design patterns: layout guidelines for common tasks
    • Structuring and navigating commands and features
      • Grouping principles
      • Cognitive principles
      • Layout basics
    • Managing and selecting from lists of objects
    • Form-filling
    • Working with tables
    • Searching
    • Editing
    • Printing
    • Saving
    • Dialog boxes
    • Error messages
    • User assistance

Format

This full-day tutorial includes lectures, exercises, and discussion.

Handouts

Copies of all presentation slides

Who Should Attend:

Whether you are designing applets for a website or creating a full-blown enterprise application, the fundamental guidelines described during this full-day session will help you better understand your users’ needs and create more efficient and effective applications.

Designers, program managers, usability engineers, and developers can all benefit from this guidance, as the class covers interaction design and task analysis along with the guidelines. No prior knowledge of usability methods is assumed, and the day is intended to appeal to all disciplines. The focus is on the user experience of applications, so no code samples will be discussed; a programming background is not required.

See Also:

Application Usability 2: Dialogue and Workflow Design details how to combine the interaction primitives explained in Application Usability 1 into a full-fledged application that optimally supports user tasks. Each of the tutorials is a full-day, self-contained seminar and can be taken independently. Taken together, however, they will cover the full range of usability issues encountered in application design.

Instructor:

photo of Chris NodderChris Nodder is a User Experience Specialist with Nielsen Norman Group. He works with large and small clients across Europe and the US, in industries as diverse as financial services, health care, entertainment, e-commerce, telecommunications, government, intranets, and highly specialized B2B sectors. He coauthored the NN/g reports on B2B usability and wishlists and gift giving, conducting focus groups, user studies, and field research. Before joining NN/g, Nodder worked as a usability consultant at NatWest Bank in the UK, and then as a senior user researcher at Microsoft Corp. His experiences managing the usability group at NatWest are captured in the book The Politics of Usability. During his seven years at Microsoft, Nodder was responsible for many products, including the user experience for XP Service Pack 2, a major upgrade to Windows XP (documented in the book Security and Usability). He has created personas, reality TV episodes, and even whole rooms ("usertoriums") as ways of getting developers to walk in their customers’ shoes. Nodder earned an M.S. in human-computer interaction from Guildhall University, London, and a B.S. in psychology from the Polytechnic of East London. He has presented at and spoken on panels for conferences such as UPA, CHI, Group, CSCW, and British HCI.