First Progress Report - Nick JosephFor our independent resarch topic in the area of design, we have chosen designing graphical user interfaces for software used in education. While most of our research will revolve around GUI's for kids in the middle school area, other information has also been found regarding GUI's used in education at the college and grad school level. (For example, it is believed that GUI's used at the college level will more likely hinder a students ability to learn rather than improve it and CLI's (command-line interfaces) are considered to be ideal.) While there are a lot of different resources available on the web involving GUI design in general, it was rather difficult to find any specifically related to educational software. And so the library will be our most useful resource in this area and the web will be used to find current trends in GUI design in general. Some common Dont's associated with good GUI design:
Some common Do's associated with good GUI design:
Some interesting links involving graphical user interfaces in the field of education: Java Applets In Education The Man-Machine Interface Principles Of Good GUI Design Trade-offs between the six essentials of GUI Design• 1 – Simplicity • Making the interface too simple takes away some of the more useful and powerful features that you could add for more advanced users. • Simpler programming languages like java are easier to use but not nearly as powerful as languages like c++. • 2 – Consistency • Making the interface consistent allows for easier navigation but again this could be restraining and irritating for advanced users. Some common don’ts of interface design is to make the user feel constricted. “Give the user control, don’t control the user.” • 3 – Usefulness • Making an interface truly useful and powerful can also make the interface much more complex and less usable. • One of the goals in good interface design is to make it accessible. The user should have easy access to the software / interface. An example of this is when Flash applications started coming out. They were very useful but it was hard for schools to acquire the Flash software and so a lot of the schools couldn’t use the applications. • Truly useful and powerful software might not be very easily accessible. • 4 – Usability • The only drawback of trying to make an interface usable is that, once again, powerful and useful features might not be included. It’s hard to make an interface useful and usable at the same time. • 5 – Accessibility • Accessible software / applications / interfaces might not be as useful as more technologically advanced applications that aren’t easily accessible. • An example of this could be java applications. They are easily accessible because java applications can run on just about any type of hardware / operating system but don’t have the possibility of being nearly as powerful as applications designed specifically for one type of hardware / operating system. • 6 – Coherence • By only adding what the user needs to see you’re limiting your interface to only one type of user. In other words the interface feels generic and therefore the user feels generic. By adding lots of features and extraneous material the user feels like the application is designed for them personally and so it becomes more usable and useful. • Extra but more powerful features could be added by not making the interface coherent allowing the interface to be more useful, but could also be cluttering and irritating.
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