Discussion Archive: May 2006

first interaction designer: success or failure

H! usabilty like-minded people,

I reported earlier that I am the very first interaction designer at a company of 300 employees and I more or less had all the freedom to define my own function. As predicted by many of you the "empowered" designer stuff pops up. And there is another thing about having much freedom, it is noticed by others as well... (feel free to think far fetched thoughts).

Minimising visual overload

Hi,

I would be interested to know if anyone has explored reduction in potential
visual overload of graphical based interfaces? Particularly around action
buttons which take action on some visible object in the UI.
There are two aspects which I'm considering, one is the visual appearance of
the button (should it look like a button - affordances - or can it appear
much simpler). The second is whether it can be hidden altogether until the
user has moved focus onto the object which the command applies.

aquire usability labrats

I don't know about "labrats" ;-) , but if you want to recruit "usability test participants", there are several good resources out there with recruiting tips, tricks, non-disclosure forms, and other helpful stuff if you're just getting started with a recruiting program. A few:
http://stcsig.org/usability/resources/toolkit/toolkit.html"A Practical Guide to Usability Testing", Dumas & Redish.

Terminology for Infrastructure/Secondary interaction?

Is anyone aware of a particular terminology being used to distinguish common interaction/UI items from application-specific ones? Examples include a progress message on long processes, or a confirmation page to prevent double-submits. They are common to many apps but increasingly important in UX. I don't think the term "patterns" quite addresses the distinction, but maybe others feel differently.

Thanks,
www.jackbellis.com, www.workathomewednesday.com