In my final blog post this semester, I will be talking about a concept that stood out to me from this course.
When I come across a website, an application, or something similar, I automatically make judgments about it. Judging is my hobby clearly. I tend to notice certain things that the interface does or does not do well. It is sort of intuitive. It just 'feels' right or wrong. I have experienced this several times and it was good to learn that there are a set of "laws" that determine what constitutes good design and unofficially govern what makes a product good or evil bad.
Laws is not the best word to use in this regard. They are more like a rule of thumb to follow to achieve to help find a useful if not ideal solution; better known as heuristics. For instance, a heuristic in tic-tac-toe is play in the middle. It's a strategy that doesn't guarantee winning but rather increases the probability of winning. In the field of interaction design, a heuristic is a general idea to follow to help achieve more usable and better looking interfaces.
Jacob Neilsen defined the following heuristics in 1994 and they are still used today.
- Visibility of system status
- Match between system and real world
- User control and freedom
- Consistency and standards
- Error prevention
- Recognition rather than recall
- Flexibility and efficiency of use
- Aesthetic and minimalist design
- Help users recognize, diagnose and recover from errors
- Help and documentation
An important ability to have in the field of UX and more broadly, computer science, is the ability to look at an interface and determine what its strong points and shortcomings are. Heuristics help narrow the search space and thus make it easier to find problems with interfaces. But this is only one aspect of the heuristics. Once possible errors are found, a person should be able to precisely describe why the heuristic is violated. This aspect of the course has helped me hone this particular trait and has more importantly taught me the vocabulary to talk about it. Additionally, I got a chance to talk about different topics in UX via my blog posts and this too helped me improve in this aspect. The ability to find flaws in an interface is usable in nearly every field of computer science and is definitely a good tool to have.
No comments:
Post a Comment