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UI Design Issues (RSS)
One of the most well-understood and salient principles underlying the ergonomics of graphical user interface design is Fitts' Law . Named for Paul Fitts, a psychologist at Ohio State University, Fitts' Law is a mathematical model of fine motor control
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I know I seldom do two posts in a day, but in addition to Rich's guest article , I wanted to point to a very interesting article Sander, one of our designers, wrote on the Excel blog . The article is focused around the charting experience, but he posted
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Yesterday morning we were sitting in the office of one of our usability researchers watching some DVCAM tapes from tests conducted a few weeks ago. We had a discussion that got me thinking about a set of tests we ran several years ago to determine the
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Yesterday, I mentioned the new contextual spelling feature that is part of Office 2007. Writing the post reminded me of a story from years past... One of the things we've tried to do from time to time is reduce the number of modal alerts that pop up as
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One of the most challenging aspects of developing the new UI has been making sure that everything ends up loaded into the airplane before it takes off. Confused? Let me explain. Sometimes I think about shipping Office like an airplane taking off. Our
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I'm sure many of you have experienced being the "one who knows about computers." In social and family situations this often means having to help to fix, clean up, or otherwise restore a computer experience which has fallen into disrepair. There are a
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Back in the article " Set In Our Ways? " I talked about one of the design issues we were thinking about at the time--namely, whether or not it was OK sometimes to break commands out of a set. In particular, we were thinking about the Mini Toolbar which
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A couple of weeks ago when I talked about The Feature Bob Invented , I mentioned that we use PowerPoint as an easy way to prototype UI, especially in the early stages of design. A number of people have asked me for more details, and so today I thought
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Today, just thinking aloud... A minor design conundrum we face is as follows: based on the data we collect , we can see that within certain sets of related features, some of them are used much more frequently than others. Should we ever act on this data
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Last Monday , I set out a simple brain teaser for the Word gurus out there. I listed a number of seemingly unrelated features in Word 2003 and asked the question "what do these have in common?" John Topley got the answer I was looking for in the very
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The success of a user interface depends on getting the details right. That's not to say that a little bit of fit-and-finish work can save a horrible design, but a good idea won't thrive either unless enough of the little details are right. I know that
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Much is made in the business world about the 80/20 rule. Also known as the Pareto principle, the basic idea is that in many phenomena 80% of consequences stem from 20% of the causes. Wikipedia has a good discussion of the principle , its myriad applications,
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The status bar. A ubiquitous piece of the modern user interface, hardly anyone seems to pay it mind. That attitude often extends to interaction designers as well. The status bar, if you are new to the world of computers, is the (usually) gray strip commonly
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A comment we've heard again and again about the Office 12 interface after people use it or see it demoed live is: "wow, it's so much better than I imagined just by seeing the screenshots." Several people made that comment to me once again after my talk
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One of the major engineering feats associated with shipping Office is making sure it runs fast enough. This effort, which we classify under the broad heading of "performance" includes responsiveness (how quickly a button responds when you click it), throughput
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