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Application Usability 1: Page-Level Building Blocks for Feature Design
- New York: Monday, February 27
- Las Vegas: Thursday, March 15
- San Francisco: Wednesday, April 4
- Amsterdam: Wednesday, April 25
Kara Pernice
Garrett Goldfield
Full-Day Training Course
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 might seem simple, but people don’t always use them correctly. Also, some website controls
deviate from standard designs, complicating usability. Both situations have profound implications for the overall
user experience.
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
- Cognitive Principles - How people think, and why this impacts screen element design
- Which screen element (widget) to use in which circumstance
- When to deviate from standards and style guides
- How to choose between different widgets that perform similar functions
- Balancing errors, time to complete tasks and visually appealing interfaces
- 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 which widget, and how
- Selection: Menus (drop downs, panels, lists, etc.), hierarchies, long lists, tabs
- Shortcuts and accelerators
- Selection devices, including keyboard commands, mouse use, scratch pad and touch screen.
- Data entry: Form fields, label placement, in-line descriptions and assistance
- Buttons: Button behavior, radio buttons, checkboxes, tool bars, command links
- Manipulation: Scrollbars and sliders, multimedia controls, item manipulation controls (handles, frames, rotators)
- Editing: Standard edit controls, selection behaviors
- Expandable areas on the screen, scrolling areas within the screen
- Grouping: Group boxes, white space
- Chronology
- Hybrid controls: Menu and split buttons, choosing exactly n options, linked controls, timeline controls, image maps as selectors
- Error messages, notifications & context sensitive help: Tool tips, balloons, system notifications
- Variations of the standard controls
- When is it appropriate to “roll your own” controls?
- Window types: Which type to use, and when
- Primary windows
- Secondary windows: Dialogs, alerts
- Communicating with users
- Progress indicators
- Communicating errors
- Design patterns: Layout guidelines for common tasks
- Structuring and navigating commands and features: Grouping principles, cognitive principles, layout basics
- How patterns come together in a UI to convey meaning
- Managing and selecting from object lists
- Form-filling
- Tables
- Searching
- Editing
- 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’re designing website applets or creating a full-blown enterprise
application, the fundamental guidelines described in 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 course,
which covers interaction design and task analysis, in addition to widget 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.
If you’re designing for mobile devices such as the iPhone, Android, or iPad, consider our specialized seminar on
Touchscreen Apps Usability.
Instructors
Kara Pernice is the Managing Director at Nielsen Norman Group. She has led many of
NN/g’s intercontinental research studies and generated the resulting design guidelines. She coauthored
the book Eyetracking Web Usability as well as many research reports, including
Designing Corporate Intranets,
Designing for Accessibility,
Designing for People Over the Age of 65, and
Designing Websites to Maximize Press Relations.
She is a leading authority on intranet usability and eyetracking usability ( The Wall Street Journal called her “an
intranet guru”). She judged the submissions for and coauthored NN/g’s
Government Intranets Report and its Intranet Design Annuals in
2001,
2002,
2003,
2005,
2006,
2007,
2008, and
2009.
She has also done extensive research in evaluating emotion and design, given presentations on a wide range of topics,
and worked with clients in various industries, including publishing, entertainment, technology, finance,
pharmaceuticals, and government.
She has more than 20 years of experience in UX design and research, and has established successful usability programs at
Lotus Development, Iris Associates (an IBM subsidiary), and Interleaf. She chaired the Usability Professionals’
Association 2000 and 2001 conferences, and served as 2002 conference advisor. She holds an M.B.A. from Northeastern
University and a B.A. from Simmons College.
Presenting in New York and Las Vegas.
Garrett Goldfield is a User Experience Specialist at Nielsen Norman Group, where he consults
with clients in a broad range of industries, including ecommerce, automotive, health care, finance, media,
telecommunications, education, and nonprofits, as well as highly specialized B2B sites. Previously, Garrett
managed the User-Centered Design group for Intuit's Tax Division, focusing on incorporating UCD processes
within Intuit's development cycle for TurboTax software and its Web applications. Prior to working at Intuit,
Goldfield worked at General Electric’s Information Systems Division, where he conducted ground-breaking
work in ecommerce interactions for marketplace transactions; and at The Aerospace Corporation, where he
pioneered standards for HCI telemetry data presentation for Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command. Goldfield's
research focuses on usability testing, contextual inquiry, and ethnographic user studies. He has also published
and presented on cost justification and ROI for usability practices, brainstorming methodologies, analysis, and
interpretation of qualitative user data.
Presenting in San Francisco and Amsterdam.
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