Design Basics

Question 1

What materials must you understand?

Answer 1

The users’ needs or requirements
The computer or hardware factors
The human factors or physical attributes
The HCI
The process

Question 2

What are the 8 principles of design?

Answer 2

Visibility
Feedback
Constraints
Consistency
Affordable
Error Prevention
Know your user
Universal Approach

Question 3

Describe Visibility

Answer 3

Functions should be visible so users can determine what to do next.

Menus shouldn’t only show the most used items and hide the rest which makes it difficult for the user to determine exactly what is possible with the UID

Question 4

Describe Feedback

Answer 4

Feedback is informing the user of what action was performed and what resulted from that action.

It can be audio, visual, verbal, tactile and any combination of them.

You must provide various versions of feedback to take into account diversity. E.g. audio for blind users and text for deaf users.

Question 5

Describe Constraints

Answer 5

This is restricting what the user can do based on what is currently taking place. This helps to reduce the chances that a user will perform an erroneous action.

E.g. graying out menu items when their use would result in an incorrect result under the current situation

Question 6

Describe Consistency

Answer 6

The mechanisms chosen to show and achieve specific types of actions should remain the same throughout the system.

E.g using left mouse button to select an item in all cases instead of switching between left and right buttons

Question 7

Describe affordance

Answer 7

This is an attribute of an object that indicates how to use it. For computers affordances are conventions that are learnt.

Question 8

Describe error prevention

Answer 8

Humans will make errors and hence you need to understand how, when and why these errors occur and build your UI accordingly.

Allow the user to recover from an error and also reduce the possibility of making errors.

Question 9

Describe Universal Approach

Answer 9

Firstly you need to remember you are not the user and you need to build an UI for everyone.

Remove all barriers to the successful use of the application by meeting the accessibility standards of the OS being used.

Question 10

Describe Know your Users

Answer 10

Who are you users?
They probably aren’t like you so you can’t design as if you’re the main user
Talk to them using interviews, open ended discussions, participatory design
Watch them, take notes of the actions they perform, look at he user created artifacts and let them keep a diary of what they did and results.