A timely post!

I'm currently in the middle of The Usability Engineering Lifecycle: A Practitioner's Handbook for User Interface Design and it's an interesting read (if a little dry in places for my normal tastes).

I was interested to see that I'm already about 2/3 of the way there, and that most of the best practices that I'm missing have a lot to do with only having a small team - we all wear several hats.

If you have a fixed user base (as opposed to pretty much anybody when it comes to web hosting that we have :) I think you'll get a lot of useful insights out of the first 50 pages alone.

Actually, one of the ideas I'm exploring at the moment is building two user interfaces for each product from the very beginning, and allowing the user to set their preference on first run. One would be point, click, lots of questions. The other would be denser layout, less prods and keyboard oriented.

Of course, being lazy, I want to be able to do this so that when we add apps, it would be transparent from a coders point of view.

Whether or not this will be possible is still up for internal debate (internal as in inside my head internal).

There are other ways I'm looking at tweaking the UI. The one I like the most (and actually think it can be easily integrated) is a password field preference. I'd like users to be able to set a preference so that when they are changing a password (email/FTP etc), they can either enter the password in clear text, or enter it twice "starred". If you're in a shared environment, you might go for the latter, but what purpose does that serve when you're on your own machine at home? Other than to slow you down a bit :)

The other key element of UI design that gets harder as the project grows is consistency of layout. For us, having in house CSS helps, but I still find certain scripts every now and then that have buttons in slightly the wrong place, or actions that don't lead to intuitive conclusions. Allocating someone to keep on eye on these things is quite usefiul.

As an aside (and rant), does anyone know a simple, well designed (that shuts out Totem :) media player for Windows or Linux, that maintains a clean, intuitive playlist that doesn't try to show you how "cool" it is. On Windows, I use WNP and WinAmp, and both just piss me off. If I'd wanted 8pt text I'd have set that in Window ty very much WinAmp :(. And WMP can't seem to decide whether to be skinned or not. Even when you choose no skinning, it likes to "fade away" if you leave it alone for a second. Grrr. I mean, how hard can it be to create an application that cleanly uses the OS's UI to actually create an app that's intuitive to a native OS user??? Rant over.

.02

cLive ;-)

In reply to Re: Can I keep my OMI? by cLive ;-)
in thread Can I keep my OMI? by pg

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