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Chapter 21. Controls

Controls can be categorized 4 different types: imperative controls, selection controls, entry controls, and display controls.

1. Imperative controls : command, action statements, corresponds to a verb in language.
2. Selection controls : corresponds to a noun upon which to operate
3. Entry controls : enable users to enter somethings
4. Display controls : display and visualization of information

Buttons, butcons, hyperlinks, etc are kinds of imperative controls. Each has advantages and disadvantages. Button is the most familiar and obvious control. Users can be noticed that it’s a button and it will work. Another one of imperative controls is butcon. Butcon is a word composed with button and icon. Butcon is useful in toolbar. Butcon will be difficult novice user but for power and intermediate users, it’s very fast and strong tools. Nowaday, hyperlinks are very widely used, because of world wide web. Its visual affordance is very easy, click then move new page. We do not have to use this as a action command. Because the hyperlinks almost always used as a navigation.

Check boxes, flip-flop buttons, radio buttons, combutcons, list controls, and tree controls are kinds of selection control. Check boxes are have strong visual affordance that can be selected or deselected. The check boxes can be expanded as latching butcon. Flip-flop buttons have two states: on state and off state. However, usually it’s not easy because users does not know it has two states before clicking the button. Radio buttons are similar to check boxes but radio buttons can select only one in the group. So, if select somethings, then automatically deselected previous selected one. It can be expanded as a radio butcon. Combutcons are a composed word of combo, button, and icon. List controls has several text messages in the control and can select one or multiple lines of them. Do not use horizontal scroll in list controls, because it makes users very annoying. Combo boxes is also one of the select controls. Combo boxes can reduce spaces compared to list controls. But it’s hard to see at glance.

Most famous entry control is edit control. And additionally spinner, dials and sliders are also one of the entry controls. Careful consideration about data boundary is needed for edit control. Bounded edit controls must inform their boundaries to user gently. Spinner controls are variant case of edit controls in that it has two additional buttons at the end of the edit control. Increase the value or decrese the value. It has visually strong meaning and also controlable with mouse wheel. Dial and slider controls are also important although it’s not too frequently used. Edit controls has two error correction modes: active validation and passive validation.

Finally, tex controls, scrollbars and splitters are one of the display controls. Text controls can display text message without input. Scrollbars can display the total pages, current page number, and first sentence or thumbnails of indicated page. Lastly, splitters can divide the application controls into several group.

The above controls are not total controls, however, each of those controls are very frequently used and it’s important for standard program. If we do not use appropriately, users will be very confused and hard to use.

Chapter 6. The Foundations of Design: Scenarios and Requirements

This chapter shows the process that is bridging the research-design gap, and this process consists of four major activities: developing stories or scenarios, to define requirements from the scenarios, to define fundermental framework using these requiremenets, and filling details of the framework.

Scenario is a powerful tool for interactive design, because of its effectiveness of visual depiction. John Carroll’s concept of scenario-based design in his book, Making Use, is based on accomplishing users’ task. Carroll’s scenario-based design concept, however, has two major drawbacks: lack of understanding user, and lack of users’ goal ands motivations. The two major shortcomings are because it’s not based on personas. Thus, in order to overcome these drawbacks, we need to use persona-based scenarios. There are three types of persona-based scenarios: context scenarios, key-path scenarios, and validation scenarios. Each scenarios has their own purposes, and in this chapter will be concentrate on the context scenarios. Additionally, persona-based scenario is different from traditional use case in that persona-based scenarios focus not only functions of the system, but priorities of the functions and how to interact with users. On the other hands, use case equally concentrate on the functional requirements of the systems and their descriptions.

The definition of requirements are a little bit different from the usual requirements definition, which is just function or feature of the product. In this case, requirements has a meaning, users’ needs. In requirement definition phase, we need to distinguish the problem and solution. It means we have to know what is the problems, and then how to solve the problems. And requirement definition using personas and scenarios comprise five steps: creating problems and vision statement, brainstorming, identifying persona expectations, constructing context scenarios, and identifying requirements.

In first step, creating problems and vision statement, we have to know what directions these scenarios and requirements should be headed in. If we lack a clear product mandate, then we will considerably confuse. In this step, we need two statements. One is problem statements that defines the purpose of the design initiative, and the other is a vision statement which is inverse of problem statement.

Secondly, in brainstorming step, main purpose of this step is to eliminate as much preconception as possbile. So designer remains open-minded and flexible.

Thirdly, identifying persona expectations step is a step for formally recording persona’s mental model.

Fourth step is constructing context scenario. Context scenarios’ purpose is describing broad and relatively swallow context such as usage patterns, exhibits, and other considerations.

Finally, identifying requirements step is that analyze context scenarios and extract persona’s needs and requirements.

Chapter 8. Synthesizing Good Design: Principles and Patterns

There are two major subjects in chapter 8: design principles and design patterns. Here is rough definition of the two subjects: Design principles are general guideline for better design, and design patterns are general solutions, which can be patternized, for solving common design problems.

Firstly, the design principles have several levels from very abstract levels, design values and conceptual principles, to practical levels, behavioral and interface-level principles. And then, the subcategories have also some distinguishable works. To sum up the core of each principles, the behavioral and interface-level principles are based on minimizing users’ cognitive, memory, visual, and physical works. And design values are principles that can be represented as ethical, purposeful, pragmatic, and elegant interactive design. These principles be base of designing process, so we have to keep in mind when designing.

Second part of chapter 8 is design patterns. Design pattern comes from architecture area, Christopher Alexander. However, the concept of the architectural design pattern can be applied to other areas such as interaction design. Usually we encounter several design problems during actual designing. And the solutions of the problems are oftenly similar to each other. So those similar solutions can be patternized. This is called design patterns. Because of the reason, design patterns can solve similar design problems very efficiently. The architectural design patterns do not exactly fit to interaction design pattern in that interaction design patterns deal with humans’ dynamic behaviors and activities.

Chapter 11. Eliminating Excise

Excise is that does not directly relate to users’ goal, but necessary to accomplish the goal. The purpose of chapter 11 is to introduce several ways of eliminating excises. There are some kinds of excises such as GUI excises, visual excises, and several messages like error, notifier, and confiromation. These whole excises usually stop users’ proceedings and their flow(In this context, the flow means absolute concentration about something, maybe it’s from the book, Flow). Thus, in order to prohibit users’ distraction from excises, we have to know what is excise, and how to avoid distraction from unnecessary excise. One of the significant excise is navigation. But distraction from navigation excises can be improved by some design properties, such as breathcrum, signspots, annotated scrollbar, and mapping between physical and mental images. Also, even though hierachical data structures are very helpful and well-matched with computer internal structures, the users’ view point are not familiar with hierarchical data. Alternatively monocline grouping is better than hierarchical representation.