Purpose
In this individual assignment you will share some of your favorite examples of good and bad interfaces or interaction design and apply good designing concepts to those examples.
What to do
A. Read Notes on Norman's design principles
B. Find and analyze some examples
1. Find an example of an interface feature that you especially like, and another example of one that causes you problems.
2. Analyze these examples in terms of Norman's design principles (visibility, feedback, constraints, mapping, consistency, affordance) and/or Nielsen's usablity principles (see page 27 of text). Which principles did your good example follow? Which principles did the bad example violate?
Now skim through Smith & Mosier's design rules at https://hcibib.org/sam/. Can you find
3. A good interface that violates one of their guidelines?
4. A bad example that followed one of these principles, but should not have done so?
C. Make a web page describing your examples
• Write up your analysis: one paragraph per example. Remember that this is a writing intensive course, so the writing will be evaluated. Give a coherent argument explaining your judgment. What guideline was followed or violated? Why was the interface more usable or less usable as a result? Write professionally, as if you were making a report for a client or your boss.
• Make screen dumps or take digital images of your examples, as appropriate. Please use GIF or JPG formats so that they can be viewed on any platform.
• Put the images and your analysis in a web page on your UH ITS account web site (or your own server if you have one) with the paragraph of analysis.