Usability Week 2009
San Francisco
Jun 22-27
New York
Jul 13-17
Sydney
Jul 27-Aug 1
Edinburgh
Sep 14-18

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

  • San Francisco: Friday, June 26
  • New York: Not offered
  • Sydney: Friday, July 31
  • Edinburgh: Thursday, September 17

Chris Nodder
Kara Pernice

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 necessarily 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

  • 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 which widget, and how
    • Selection: Menus, hierarchies, long lists, tabs
    • 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
    • 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 indicators
    • 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 object lists
    • 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 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.

Related

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.

Instructors

photo of Chris Nodder Chris Nodder a Director 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. Not presenting in Edinburgh.
photo of Kara Pernice Kara Pernice is the Managing Director at Nielsen Norman Group and heads the company’s East Coast operations. She has led many of NN/g’s major intercontinental research studies, generated the resulting design guidelines, and coauthored several 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 15 years of experience in evaluating usability 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. Not presenting in San Francisco or Sydney.