Interaction Design
by Bill Verplank
from Designing Interactions
http://www.designinginteractions.com/interviews/BillVerplank
Fabian Hemmer: The shape-shifting future of the mobile phone
At Ease was an alternative to the Macintosh desktop developed by Apple Computer in the early 1990s. It provided a simple environment for new Macintosh users to help them to work without supervision. At Ease sits on top of the Finder desktop, providing a simple tab panel oriented graphical user interface in whichapplications and documents are represented by icons on large buttons. Aside from its security features, its interface and basic functionality is very similar to the Packard Bell Navigator.
“Here, I’ll send you a cyber link.”
Apple Tablet Concept Video
1995
The goal is not to make your user interface as realistic as possible. The goal is to add those details which help users identify what an element is, and how to interact with it, and to add no more than those details. UI elements are abstractions which convey concepts and ideas; they should retain only those details that are relevant to their purpose. UI elements are almost never representations of real things. Adding too much realism can cause confusion.
Lukas Mathis
People’s mental models are apt to be deficient in a number of ways, perhaps including contradictory, erroneous, and unnecessary concepts. As designers, it is our duty to develop systems and instruction material that aid users to develop more coherent, useable mental models. As teachers, it is our duty to develop conceptual models that will aid the learner to develop adequate and appropriate mental models. And as scientists who are interested in studying people’s mental models, we must develop appropriate experimental methods and discard our hopes of finding neat, elegant mental models, but instead learn to understand the messy, sloppy, incomplete, and indistinct structures that people actually have.
Donald Norman
Some Observations on Mental Models, 1983
The Treachery of Images by Renee Margritte
The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it’s just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture “This is a pipe,” I’d have been lying!
Forget about that old cliche, ‘A picture is worth a thousand words.’ Try to express the following in pictures:
‘If halibut is more than ten euros a kilo at Good Food, go to the fish market on 5th Street.’
Colin Ware
Visual Thinking for Design
Strict adherence to metaphors ties interfaces unnecessarily to the workings of the physical world. One of the most fantastic things about digital products is the that the working model presented to users need not be bound by the limitations of physics and the inherent messiness of real three-dimensional space.
Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, and David Cronin
About Face, Chapter 13 - Metaphors, Idioms, and Affordances
The goal for most software developers still remains to design for change—and there the debate is do you do it early (given foreknowledge) or later (once more is known and you know you need it)? In many cases the design should be refactored, and the patterns provide a target to do this.
Richard Helm
Design Patterns 15 Years Later: An Interview with Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, and Ralph Johnson
Complex things will require complexity. It is the job of the designer to manage that complexity with skill and grace.Don Norman Why is 37signals so arrogant?
