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The Modern Interface A Design Perspective
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COMPUTER INTERFACES HAVE EVOLVED over the past five years. With the advance of technology and the increase of people using computers, interfaces have been forced to become more user friendly and ergonomically sound. Originally, interfaces were designed by programmers, for programmers. As a result, the interfaces generally consisted of many C's, dashes, dots, and colons. This was not only boring, but it also was extremely difficult for new users to learn. With programmer-designed interfaces, there were no clues or hints for the user. Many a user would get intimidated by the amount of coding they had to sludge through to open a program. There were no visual cues to stimulate the memory. Nowadays, the interface is all about visual pleasure, metaphors, and consistency. According to Jakob Neilsen, principal of the Neilsen Norman Group and well-known web design expert, (www.nngroup.com) there are eight major issues that should be addressed when discussing the modern interface. The first issue is called the forgiveness factor. It states that "user actions should generally be reversible and that users should be warned if they try to do something that will cause irreversible data loss." This feature is wonderful for the average computer user. Most people have experienced the sinking feeling in the pits of their stomachs as they watch five hours worth of work go down the toilet because they accidentally leaned on the keyboard and pushed Ctrl + Alt + Delete with their elbows. With the old interface design, there was no mercy. If the user deleted a file, it was gone. In modern interface, there is the trash bin which stores all deleted data, until it is again deleted. The downside of this feature, is that it can become very tedious to deal with a computer that double and triple checks every action the user makes. A good interface should include metaphors in the design. In the Mac world, the computer desktop resembles a real desktop. It comes complete with a trashbin, files and folders, and sticky notes. This aspect of the interface is very user friendly. It allows the user to associate computer functions with real life. Direct manipulation promotes user interaction with the interface. An example of direct manipulation is a roll-over, or moving a file from one folder to another by clicking on the file icon and dragging it into the desired folder. One disadvantage of direct manipulation is that it requires the user to be involved in every action. The user can easily become confused in many situations, such as installing a program. This, in turn, has opened the door to many installation programs to prevent user frustration or boredom. Another crucial part of a good interface is labelled WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get). This basically means that when printing, the document that comes out of the printer matches the document on the screen. With the old interface, it was a guessing game to print a document according to the user's preferences. However, with the increase in the amount of users, the demand to fix the problem became too strong to be ignored.Whether or not the user should be in control of all computer actions has long been a disputed subject of interface design. Some users want to be in complete control at all times, but they do not realize the amount of mundane work the computer does by itself. "For example, people are notoriously bad at vigilance tasks, so it makes sense to let the computer take control of periodically saving our word processor documents, backing up our hard drives, and reminding us of our meetings. As Jakob Neilsen says, "The feedback and dialogue aspect of the modern interface corresponds with user control. A good interface is programmed so the user isn't bothered unless the system encounters a serious problem." Items in the contemporary interface should be fairly stable. For example, icons should not move around on their own, they should reappear as they were when the user last closed them. This element of the interface is rapidly changing due to the Internet. Many users connecting to the same web pages day after day have found that too much stability can be boring! Most companies now change their web page interface periodically to increase user interest. With interfaces designed by graphic designers, using a computer has become a pleasant experience. Contrary to the old interfaces, what is displayed on the screen is generally easy to understand. The World Wide Web has much to do with the current interface, and the future of the interface. In the future, perhaps the interface will evolve into a tactile object to give the user a higher level of interactive experience.
http://tesla.clearink.com/~nate/187/assign10/index.html "The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design" edited by Brenda Laurel, copyright 1990, Apple Computer, Inc. |
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