Process of Designing Interfaces and Dialogues: Analytical Essay

Process of Designing Interfaces and Dialogues: Analytical Essay

Designing Interfaces and dialogues

To design usable interfaces and dialogues, you must answer the same who, what, when, where, and how questions used to guide the design of forms and reports.

Deliverables and outcomes:

The deliverable and outcome from the system interface and dialogue design is the creation of a design specification. This specification is also similar to the specification produced for form and report designs—with one exception. Recall that the design specification document discussed in Chapter 10 had three sections.

1. Narrative Overview
2. Sample design
3. Testing and usability assessment

For interface and dialogue designs, one additional subsection is included: a section outlining the dialogue sequence—the ways a user can move from one display to another. Later in this chapter, you will learn how to design a dialogue sequence by using dialogue diagramming. An outline for a design specification for interfaces and dialogues.

Interaction Methods and Devices:

All human-computer interfaces must have an interaction style and use some hardware device(s) for supporting this interaction.

Methods of interaction:

When designing the user interface, the most fundamental decision you make relates to the methods used to interact with the system. Command Language Interaction In command language interaction, the user enters explicit statements to invoke operations within a system. For example, to rename a copy of a file called “file.doc” in the current directory as “newfile.doc” at the command prompt within Linux, you would type: $ cp file.doc newfile.doc Command language interaction places a substantial burden on the user to remember names, syntax, and operations. Yet command languages are good for experienced users, for systems with a limited command set, and for rapid interaction with the system.

Menu Interaction A significant amount of interface design research has stressed the importance of a system’s ease of use and understandability. A menu is simply a list of options; when an option is selected by the user, a specific command is invoked or another menu is activated. For smaller and less complex systems with limited system options, you may use a single menu or a linear sequence of menus. For large and more complex systems, you can use menu hierarchies to provide navigation between menus. Although more complex menu structures provide greater user flexibility, they may also confuse users about exactly where they are in the system. With a pop-up menu (also called a dialogue box), menus are displayed near the current cursor position so users don’t have to move the position or their eyes to view system options

To more easily see how to apply these guidelines, contrasts a poorly designed menu with a menu that follows the menu design guidelines. For example, s a design form in which a menu structure is being defined; menu items are added by selecting the “Type Here” tags and typing the words that represent each item on the menu. With the use of a few easily invoked options, you can also assign shortcut keys to menu items, connect help screens to individual menu items, define submenus, and set usage properties (see the Properties window within form Interaction The premise of form interaction is to allow users to fill in the blanks when working with a system.

Hardware Options for System Interaction:

In addition to the variety of methods used for interacting with a system, there is also a growing number of hardware devices employed to support this interaction The selection of an interaction device must be made during logical design because different interfaces require different devices. Another means to gain an understanding of device usability is to highlight which devices have been found most useful for completing specific tasks.

Designing Interfaces:

Building on the information provided in Chapter 10 on the design of content for forms and reports, here we discuss issues related to the design of interface layouts. Designing layouts To ease user training and data recording, you should use standard formats for computer-based forms and reports similar to those used on paper-based forms and reports for recording or reporting information. This form has several general areas common to most forms:

• Header information
• Sequence and time-related information
• Instruction or formatting information
• Body or data details
• Totals or data summary
• Authorization or signatures
• Comments In many organizations, data are often first recorded on paper-based forms and then later recorded within application systems.

Because you can control the sequence for users to move between fields,