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  • Posted on January 29, 2011

Human factors engineering

Human factors engineering is a generalist term used to describe a number of disciplines that study how users appreciate and interact with products. This may include product design and branding, product psychology, user-interface design, and education factoring. Human factors engineering is referred to in much of the world as ergonomics, and may occasionally be shortened to simply human factors or human engineering.

Human factors draws on experts from many different disciplines to paint a clearer picture of how a human will interact with a product. The essential goal of human factors is to analyze how people are likely to use a product, and to design the product in such a way that it will feel most natural to them.

Human factors has its origins in World War II, when it was used to address airplane design so that new airplanes could be built to allow the pilot to easily assimilate the multitude of information he received. Early human factors research dealt primarily with industrial and defense machines and the ways in which they interacted with humans, though some early consumer research was also conducted.

via | what-is-human-factors-engineering

  • Posted on December 04, 2010

Visual perspective

Slowly and steadily visual design for web User Interface Design is getting constrained to only icon imagery. It’s already been transformed with powerful content management tools powerfully tied with liquid style-sheets and on demand content feeding.  With the emergence of blog centric content syndication the shift is largely focused on content than visual design. I assume,  it’s  the trend and vogue in visual perception of current horizon where we live in. The kind of visual design which use to be prime aspect of the user interface in erstwhile designs has reached oblivion in time unknown.

Nevertheless, visuals play a vital role in conveying information than a text;  as popular adage says ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’. Unfortunately, browser discrimination, varied display capabilities, rendering issues have forced visuals to step back making a way for text oriented design. And technically; accessibility issues, on-demand dynamic content has certainly backed textual representation than visuals. I love  to dribble more often when I fear of not seeing more of visual focused site designs in coming days :)

With the rise of the beautiful & effective iconographics everywhere,  I was pondering lot over visual presentation and its importance in everyday design. With powerful wordpress to backpackit-organizer, everything has moved to more lean, textual and style-sheet based markup presentation. If an information has to be presented in more subtle and to-the point fashion, there’s no alternative than relying in UI components of grid genre than any better image itself, due to gelling and dynamic nature of today’s UI components.

Nevertheless, when it comes to such feeling of less of visual design in  now a days corporate sites, I admire the elegant balance of white-space, text and visual design in GE’s online presence.

  • Posted on December 01, 2010

Out of context is out of focus

The biggest, best, most award-winning movie site on the planet  was successfully shopped by Amazon.  After acquisition, Amazon has very effectively pulled-up the styling and presentation of IMDB website. Anyone who’s visiting IMDB website for years know that, it’s a heavily legacy site running on tables  than modern div’s. I am sure, Amazon would have done too much of styling uplifting to get this site work in new decade standards.

Due to that fact, still there are lot of usability issues lingering randomly around the site.

I had to struggle to find a way to add a movie to my favorites list. Though there’s a facility to do so, it was out of the context.  The problem is, unusable design context. Hence, I propose this design solution to the right context to add movie to favorite list.  A link can be provided to fill the empty space available just below the poster. Later,  a link can be provided to buy the movie by Amazon :)

Before :

Problem:

  1. Non-clickable link with hefty space between notifier and action.
  2. Click-able image button with plus mark. I wonder what does that plus mark say. Enough cue to confuse the user ?
  3. Note: Out of context confuses the user & drives away the intent. In the fast changing world, a penny lost is business lost.

After :

  1. A simple solution:  One distinctive click-able link to achieve user’s goal & no more image based buttons.
  2. A textual link is more apt than image-button. Even when imges are disabled, a text link loads.

Tonic – Get a  nifty and lovely android app to squeeze more juice out of  imdb. Working efficiently on  Android powered HD2.

  • Posted on October 26, 2010

Header usefulness

There are umpteen daily tech news websites in the net. computer-world is my one stop daily dose of tech news on the net.what I like about the site is simple and effective user interface coupled with great navigational functionality. I’m of the opinion that design is all about solving complex problems and bringing all users to the median of ‘simple user’.

Very simple design shift makes computer-world website an user-friendly place to munch tech news. For example: The homepage button. Typically, home page icon acts as a button to reach the home page of the site. If that’s what it does, then why there’s a need for ‘home’ button on the navigation ? computer-world go it right, and  got rid of ‘home’ button. Now, branding icon acts as home page link.

Many websites display alternate text on mouse over of the header icon or shows the icon or displays icon on the status bar. That’s like, taking user for the ride. computer-world has changed that notion by changing the mouse-hover action by displaying it takes user to home page on mouse-hover. Interestingly it doesn’t show hover animation when the user is on home page. Very neat and user friendly.

As I was talking about ‘strong Information Architecture’ of such sites, site is not crowded with heft menu items on the main navigation. Every secondary link is carefully analyzed and grouped into ‘More’ menu item at the end of the ‘mast head’ navigation strip.

Site has carefully calculated the content loading speeds of the site and hence loads as crisp and as possible in all modern browsers. I tested with IE and Firefox of today’s latest versions.

Not just the content, even usable ‘User Interface is the king’ here. ‘Why wait ? it’s time to gulp some info vitamins at computerworld.com

  • Posted on September 22, 2010

Culture and the artful brain.

Is art or design is universal ?  Do culture play a role in visualizing, in fathoming art  or design?

Do  everyone perceive: a link-without-blue-color and no-underline as a clickable link ? Specially in one internet age,  it’s quiet obvious that, perceiving a communication design from this corner of the world to other corner of the world is all same. But, is it true ? What is netizen’s culture in the ‘Global village’ ?

I am not denying the enormous role played by culture. Obviously culture plays a tremendous role, otherwise you wouldn’t have different artistic styles – but it doesn’t follow that art is completely idiosyncratic and arbitrary either or that there are no universal laws.

Let me put it somewhat differently. Let’s assume that 90% of the variance you see in art is driven by cultural diversity or – more cynically – by just the auctioneer’s hammer, and only 10% by universal laws that are common to all brains. The culturally driven 90% is what most people already study – it’s called art history.

I found this interesting read by BBC about The Artful Brain.

  • Posted on July 25, 2010

Is Agile UX is meaningless ?

Whether you want it or not, it’s inevitable to avoid UX and Agile in today’s Software development arena. In changing scenarios company’s do adopt various software development methods and fashions.

Here’s an interesting article about Agile mindset in UX :

The true power of Agile is in understanding the underlying thinking, the attitude toward software that fueled their creation. Agile is no more than an attitude, a mindset. In fact, one likely to find greater success when starting out with Agile by ignoring the well-known Agile activities and principles and to continue working the way one currently work, and focusing instead on only one change: attitude. That shift, in turn, will drive change from within current practice, rather than attempt to impose it from the outside.

>> Why Agile UX is meaningless without an Agile attitude
and
>> 12 Best Practices for UX in an Agile Environment