GUI Design

1. An Introduction To Graphical User Interface Design Concepts

Objectives:

• Simple Concepts for designing Graphical User Interfaces
• Designing for a complex world
• Principles that drove GUI design

In the very early days of computers were huge, complicated, and consumed required large amounts of electricity. They also required a special breed of people called users to operate them. Back then, if you wanted to become a computer user, you first got yourself alab coat, then joined a course to study the black arts of computerdom, learning strange commands, writing weird code (that looks like a wizard's incantations), all needed to make the computer do the things you wanted it to do, which it condescended to do if you got it right. (Then sometimes did not, just to show you who was boss).

But even in those dark computer ages, there were people who strongly believed that computers should be usable by ordinary, regular people. An increasing amount of research, including the work at S.R.I in the 1960s, and later a Xerox Corporation’s, Palo Alto Research Center (P.A.R.C) was based on this idea. Innovations such as the mouse, windows, and the desktop environment made it possible to manipulate the computer without remembering and typing restricted commands. At Apple, the Lisa and Macintosh computers brought to light such familiar elements as the menu bar, dialog boxes, and the trash can. Slowly, computing became reachable to a wider variety of users, including a few that didn’t even wear lab coats.

The designers of the Lisa and Macintosh were part of a culture that believed passionately in the importance of good User Interface design. In order to pass on their ideas to people outside the immediate human interface community, they struck upon the idea of creating a set of human interface guidelines spelling out the exact way that the various interface elements worked. These guidelines covered everything from the way objects on the screen appear when selected, to the proper command key equivalents to be used for standard menu items.

The most important part of the guidelines, however, was not the directory of interface widgets and gadgets. It was the list of design principles which they believed lay at the heart of any good interface. As it turns out, these principles apply no matter whether a Sun SPARCstation is being worked on or an Apple Power Macintosh computer. The reason is that most of these principles work on human abilities and psychology rather than the rules of one computer platform or another.

The following is a list of 10 basic principles that drove the design of Apple's Macintosh. Similar lists appear in the user interface development guidelines for Windows, OS/2, and other major user interfaces.

The principles of User Interface design have been listed below:

• Consistency
• Aesthetic integrity
• See-and-point, not remember-and-type
• Direct manipulation
• Perceived Stability
• Metaphors from the real world
• WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get)
• Feedback and Dialog
• Forgiveness
• User Control

If you are interested in reading up a bit more on the points above (i.e. the design of Good Graphical Users Interfaces) there are links at the bottom of this page that point to a either a .pdf or .doc file which you can download and read. It really helped me design sensible, easy to use, intutive, graphical user interfaces for all the commercial applications I've ever developed.