Guidelines are a tool: building a design knowledge management system for programmers (5 years old but still applicable)
1. Designed for developers. Programmers are the users of guidelines. The structure of a tool for them should be built around their needs.
2. Focused around tasks, rather than design elements. The practice of writing software is different from that of designing interfaces, and should be reflected in how documentation for it is structured.
3. Specific, not principles. Programming is an applied art, and specifics address developers’ needs better than theories. Examples that resemble the current situation make it easier to understand the theory and make applying the guideline easier.
4. Prioritized. Design and development is a web of choices, and explicit prioritization helps make some of those choices. Not all guidelines have equal impact.
5. Succinct. Extra words won’t get read and supplementary diagrams will not get examined when the reader is in a hurry, and the reader is always in a hurry.
Originally a case study describing the creation of an internal design knowledge management tool for web developers as a means to encourage user-centered development practices.
From AIGA: American Institute of Graphics Arts
Download the full case study here.
So tell me, how many times do you look at the URL for the pages you are visiting while you are browsing? Once, twice… every time you visit a new link??
I’ve come to notice that when people visit a website, all he needed the address bar is just once, the first time he types in (or ctrl+v in) the main URL to which page he is visiting. After that, he keep following the links in the page and hardly ever needed to see which URL he’s visiting. Or, to do more justice, think of yourself, are you interested in looking at all the random URLs generated or those real long URLs of every page you visit? Do you ever keep track of them?? Of course, for security purpose, you may perhaps want to make it sure that you are still in the particular domain you intend to visit!!
Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer: Notice how many screen real estate does the address bar occupy.
So, the conclusion is, we don’t need the address bar to occupy so much screen real estate.
Now, I’ve observed my friends and myself clicking on each tab turn by turn (when more than one tab is opened) waiting for the pages in the tabs to load. When you are on a tab, you don’t know how much the the other pages in the other opened tabs are loaded with as the loading indication doesn’t tell you how much it has loaded. So, I’ve decided to use a visual indication that will show the users about the loading status of the other opened tabs other than the currently active one. Considering the above two issues, here is how my design looks.
Of course, it’s a flavor of Chrome. Once can prob’ly tweak into Chromium open source codes and develop this UI.
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A logo design is an IDENTITY (almost always represented in a visual form) by which a company delivers an image of itself in a quick and effective manner taking advantage of the visual sensitiveness of the human mind!!
As the Human mind can grasp a visual representation quicker than any other form of communication, a simple logo speaks of the whole company within the short attention span a human has.. just through a half glance!!
I’ve come across this a lot of time myself and it made me realise that there is a need to ‘think’ on this issue. To get to the point, just look at the image below and see what has been typed in the text-box.
I’m guessing, your answer probably might be ”yes.. il” or “yes.. ll” or ”yes..tl” or ”yes..H” and it keeps on going!
What I’m trying to point out is that, the text pointer there shades the text typed which created an usability issue. Usually, since the text-box may not be active at the time the user wants to type something, the user brings the pointer right where he wants to type and then click inside the text-box area. This usually leaves the ‘text pointer’ few chars away from the starting point and as the user types on, the characters itself got covered up as can be seen on the image above.
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The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.
-Fitts’ Law
