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Research Resources

Photoshop UI (Pallet toolbox, Menu and Shortcuts)
MS Word Evolution ( Toolbox to Ribbon )

Thesis Statement

Thesis

Through research and study, Team Undecided will make its attempt to survey modern UI organizational practices through studying their design and explaining with HCI principles.

Through research and study, Team Undecided will analyze HCI principles in several different applications' UI to discover the motives for focusing on specific principles as opposed to others.

Possible principles that apply to our applications (List reasoning under principle)

6.1.1. Make displays legible (or audible)

6.1.2. Avoid absolute judgment limits

6.1.3. Top-down processing

6.1.4. Redundancy gain

6.1.5. Similarity causes confusion: Use discriminable elements

6.2.1. Principle of pictorial realism

6.2.2. Principle of the moving part

6.3.1. Minimizing information access cost

6.3.2. Proximity compatibility principle

6.3.3. Principle of multiple resources

6.4.1. Replace memory with visual information: knowledge in the world

6.4.2. Principle of predictive aiding

6.4.3. Principle of consistency

Keywords

Topic: Modern UI organizational practices

Ribbon UI

UI Changes/redesign

Users don't care about design, they just want to complete their task quick. When people are visiting websites or using applications, they don't spend their time analyzing or admiring the design. They focus their attention on the task, the content, and their own data or documents. Thus, people love a design when they know the features and can immediately locate the ones they need. That is, they love a familiar design.

Menu Elimination

Navigation

See PDF file for data.

Errors

Fitts' Law

T = a + b log2 ((D/W) + 1)

Steering Law

Linear: T=a+b(d/w)

> 1 vertical Linear: T = 2a + b((n/x) + x); x = w/h

Principle of feature exposure/accessible

Features of the program need to be easily exposed so that a quick visual scan can determine what the program actually does. There are various levels of "hiding": Here's a partial list of them in order from most exposed to least exposed:

Toolbar (completely exposed)
Menu item (exposed by trivial user gesture)
Submenu item (exposed by somewhat more involved user gesture)
Dialog box (exposed by explicit user command)
Secondary dialog box (invoked by button in first dialog box)
"Advanced user mode" controls -- exposed when user selects "advanced" option
Scripted functions

Predictability and common convention

Use a common set of design patterns and guidelines so that users don't have to relearn how to perform common tasks.

Uncertainty vs. Familiarity

Fresh design will be a worse design simply because it's new and thus breaks user expectations. A better strategy is to play up familiarity and build on users' existing knowledge of how a system works.

Flexibility

Let users customize the application to meet their unique needs. Flexibility is also enhanced by letting users select options in various sequences and in letting them modify default values.