The central goal of this book is to teach the reader how to design user interfaces that will enable people to learn computer systems quickly and use them effectively, efficiently, and comfortably. The interface issues addressed are primarily cognitive, th

There is ample evidence to support the intuitive notion that experts behave differently from novices. Even though some interfaces are only intended to be used by novices, most interfaces need to be designed to accommodate both novices and expert users at

This column discusses the return to command line interfaces.

A CLI description language is implemented to define a set of command keywords and arguments forming CLI description files. The CLI description language is implemented using Extensible Markup Language (XML). A set of XML tags and corresponding semantic def

Embedded information processing has become a cost-effective competitive advantage, much as new kinds of materials have. Like any fundamentally new material, when added to the design of an object, information processing and wireless networking fundamentall

How many steps does it take to do something in your application? Have you counted? Have you thought about ways to reduce or eliminate those steps for your users? If not, you absolutely should be. Fire up your application and start counting as you click an

we must ensure that we design our applications to remain consistent with the environment in which our software runs. In more concrete terms: a Windows application should look and feel like a Windows application, a Mac application should look and feel like

It's not unusual for a site to position a long sequence of hurdles just inside their entrance.

Some are advocating that we each choose our own tune, and indeed designing libraries to help us do that. However this serves only the egos of the players (or programmers). It does nothing for the audience (or end users) except make them walk away in disgu

Platt believes that much of the problem is related to poor design, with not enough consideration for the end user. For example, he considers open source to be software written for other programmers, of little interest to the typical computer user.

One of the major issues in technology is how to make services available to the less knowledgeable, making them so-called "grandparent compliant". In addition, consumers continue to look for ways to get what they need from businesses, rather than accepting