Chris Khalil’s Musings

At Acumentum we always test our designs on multiple browsers. As we all know, one of the great pains in our business is getting a design to look, as it should, across a variety of browsers.

Internet Explorer 6 is still the most common browser on the web, yet in our office most people are running Firefox 2.0 and IE7. This makes quick testing, as you go, a pain, as IE5, IE5.5, IE6 and IE7 cannot co-exist on the same machine…or at least that used to be the case.

One of the enterprising lads in the office found that some clever people at Tredosoft have created an installer (10.3 MB) that allows you to have all versions of IE available on the same machine.

This is one of the most useful tools I’ve seen this year.

We are all familiar with a variety of common heuristics which we can use to measure, test and design interfaces. However, there are a few that tend to get overlooked, but like all good children they deserve their day in the sun! In this post I’ll just touch on some of the key aspects of these. A quick search on the web will give whole reams of further information should you be interested.

Window Organisation: By decreasing the time the user spends adjusting, moving and re-sizing windows, we can increase the amount of time they spend concentrating on their real goal, and consequently increase user-satisfaction. By observing the relative locations and size of spawned windows in relation to the parent window and other related windows one can judge whether the placement is optimal. If a certain task requires the user to move windows around, and re-size them to achieve their goal, this is a sure-fire indication of bad usability.

Some key characteristics of good window organization are
- simple user navigation
- minimal and simple user window management

Readability: The textual aspect of interfaces is very important. Much of the information imparted by a UI is textual, therefore the layout and form of the text has a significant impact on the ease with which the user assimilates information. Since text is one of the primary sources of information for users it is important how it is worded. If the text is worded poorly then the users will perceive the interface poorly. Certain standards do exist for text size, labelling, fonts and formatting.

Clarity: Crowded screens are difficult to understand and hence are difficult to use. Experimental results show that the overall density of the screen should not exceed 40%, whereas local density within groupings shouldn’t exceed 62%. Items that are logically connected should be grouped together to communicate their implied association, and can be tested against. Clarity can be empirically determined through ratios of signal to noise at the interface.

There are many more less lauded UI heuristics out there, and in the coming weeks I’ll come back and talk more about these.