Why gui standards

A system with feedback for every action helps users achieve their goals without friction. UI design should consider the nature of interaction. For frequent actions, the response can be modest. This might be something as simple as a button changing color when pressed the change notifies the user of the interaction.

The lack of such feedback forces users to double-check to see if their intended actions have been performed.

For infrequent and significant actions, the response should be more substantial. For example, when filling out a password field in the signup form, good UI might inform users of the requirements for their password. Users are much more forgiving when they have information about what is going on and are given periodic feedback about the status of the process. Visibility of system status is essential when users initiate an action that takes some time for a computer to complete.

The use of progress indicators is one of the subtle aspects of UI design that has a tremendous impact on the comfort and enjoyment of users. Good UI can comfort users by showing progress while the system is completing a task. Dropbox is indicating the status of a document upload: the current progress and the amount of time left.

Users of different skill levels should be able to interact with a product at different levels. Adding features like tutorials and explanations is extremely helpful for novice users just make sure that experienced users are able to skip this part.

Once users are familiar with a product, they will look for shortcuts to speed up commonly-used actions. You should provide fast paths for experienced users by enabling them to use shortcuts. Irrelevant information introduces noise in UI —it competes with the relevant information and diminishes its relative visibility. Simplify interfaces by removing unnecessary elements or content that does not directly support user tasks. Strive to design UI in a way that all information presented on the screen will be valuable and relevant.

Examine every element and evaluate it based on the value it delivers to users. The interface of iA Writer app is a clean typing sheet with no distractions. Users are easily annoyed by tedious data-entry sequences, especially when they have provided all the required information before.

Good UI performs a maximum of work while requiring a minimum amount of information from users. Fitts Law states that the time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.

While the character user interface was the primary method of operating computers through the s, most modern electronic devices are equipped with intuitive graphical user interfaces and the average user will rarely if ever have cause to access a computer terminal. A web user interface, or web-based graphical user interface, refers to the interaction between a user and software running on a web server wherein the user interface is the web browser and the web page it downloaded and rendered.

Technologies such as Flash, Java, JavaScript, and Silverlight enable interactions such as drag-and-drop, playing audio, drawing on the screen, and access to the keyboard and mouse. Web graphical user interfaces are platform independent, require no installation or separate software development, easy to update and monitor due to the nature of not being dependent upon the user to deploy updates, provides a vibrant UI experience, and are low cost, requiring only Ethernet or WiFi interface connectivity.

The benefits of visualizations in computing are evident in the intuitive nature of graphical user interfaces. Visualization and interactivity are similarly beneficial elements in data analytics.

Consistency and Standards. Interface designers should ensure that both the graphic elements and terminology are maintained across similar platforms. For example, an icon that represents one category or concept should not represent a different concept when used on a different screen.

Error prevention. Whenever possible, Design Systems so that potential errors are kept to a minimum. Users do not like being called upon to detect and remedy problems, which may on occasion be beyond their level of expertise.

Eliminating or flagging actions that may result in errors are two possible means of achieving error prevention. Recognition rather than recall. Minimize Cognitive Load by maintaining task-relevant information within the display while users explore the interface.

Human attention is limited and we are only capable of maintaining around five items in our short-term memory at one time. Due to the limitations of short-term memory, designers should ensure users can simply employ recognition instead of recalling information across parts of the dialogue. Recognizing something is always easier than recall because recognition involves perceiving cues that help us reach into our vast memory and allowing relevant information to surface.

For example, we often find the format of multiple choice questions easier than short answer questions on a Test because it only requires us to recognize the answer rather than recall it from our memory.

Flexibility and efficiency of use. With increased use comes the demand for less interactions that allow faster Navigation. This can be achieved by using abbreviations, function keys, hidden commands and macro facilities.

Users should be able to customize or tailor the interface to suit their needs so that frequent actions can be achieved through more convenient means. Aesthetic and Minimalist Design.

Keep clutter to a minimum. Therefore, the display must be reduced to only the necessary components for the current tasks, whilst providing clearly visible and unambiguous means of navigating to other content.

Help users recognize, diagnose and recover from errors. Designers should assume users are unable to understand technical terminology, therefore, error messages should almost always be expressed in plain language to ensure nothing gets lost in translation. Help and documentation. Ideally, we want users to navigate the system without having to resort to documentation. However, depending on the Type of solution, documentation may be necessary.

One would expect it to be fairly well developed and relatively error free. However, of the approximately 90 complaints with the Windows'95, none are performance complaints.

They are all human factors type complaints, such as how to copy a file and how to get rid of annoying icons [25].

Finally, people have so many complaints about the X-Windowing System, the third major GUI standard, that there is whole book about what is wrong with it [12]. This paper will survey the common definitions of what a GUI is and review the three common, GUI standards in the market today. It will then review three of the many human factor concepts underlying good GUI design, which are visual acuity, limits to absolute memory, and the principle of grouping. The paper will then present the effect of these factors on three GUI design areas, the amount of presented information, the grouping of information, and the placement of this information on the screen.

Following this section, the ramifications of bad versus good GUI design will be addressed. Areas for research and likely directions of future GUI design conclude the paper. This may be due to the fact that GUIs are relatively new. A GUI is a type of computer human interface on a computer.

It solves the blank screen problem that confronted early computer users [19]. These early users sat down in front of a computer and faced a blank screen, with only a prompt.

The computer gave the user no indication what the user was to do next. GUI are an attempt to solve this blank screen problem. At a conceptual level, a computer human interface is a "means by which people and computers communicate with each other" [6, ]. One can make an analogy between a computer system's GUI and a car's steering wheel. The wheel directly binds the driver to the operation and functionality of the vehicle.

When driving, a driver should not have to concentrate on the steering wheel. In the same way, the GUI binds the user of the computer system to the operation and potential of the computer system [6].

A good GUI design removes the impediment of communication with the computer system and allows the user to work directly on the problem at hand [19]. In computer science terms, the GUI is a visual operating display that the monitor presents on the monitor to the computer operator [9].

More specifically, a GUI is a specification for the look and feel of the computer system [6]. Collectively, WIMP are pictures that bring forth a certain action or an action space. The user issues commands via the GUI to computer applications. GUI usually have three major components. These three components are [10] : a windowing system, an imaging model, and an application program interface API. The windowing system builds the windows, menus, and dialog boxes that appear on the screen.

The imaging model defines the fonts and graphics that appear on the screen. WIMP are products of both the windowing system and imaging model. Finally, the API is the means in which the user specifies how and what windows and graphics appear on the screen. This has lead to a great deal of standardization and consistency among GUI design criteria. While none of these GUI designs are perfect, the overall design concepts are good enough to make radical departures counterproductive [19] , unless there are significant performance enhancements.

The Xerox Star was unique because the researchers carefully designed the computer human interface before they began designing the internal workings of the application. Unfortunately, the Xerox Star was too slow, and it was not commercially successful. He returned to Apple Computer and subsequently hired several of the original designers of Xerox Star.

They first produced the Apple Lisa. Like the Xerox Star, the Apple Lisa was not commercially successful. In , they developed the commercially successful Apple Macintosh. Because of their influence in the standardization of today's GUI design, a brief description of the major features of each standard is necessary. Apple introduced the Macintosh as a computer "for rest of us. All graphical applications copied the Macintosh in its design and usage. The Macintosh introduced the first menu, icons, and point-and-click, mouse driven processing.

With these menus and icons, the Macintosh was the first computer system that limited the users to contextual correct answers. For example, once the user made a selection via a menu, the menu limited the user's subsequent actions. The user could no longer choose something meaningless. It is a whole system of interfaces that can span machines from personal to mainframe computers. As such, it includes many functions that most GUIs do not, including a suite of networking and database tools.

Another unique item of the SAA is that the user does not need a mouse to interact with the application. All actions can be executed from the keyboard, a functionality not available in the Macintosh GUI. X-Windows is still the underlying library for these GUI. This is because any X-Windows software can use the X-Windows library, which gives it great portability and standardization across platforms. X-Windows also works directly with networks, which allows the GUI display to be on one computer and the application that the user needs on another computer.

It does not matter if the two computers are in different rooms or on different continents. Although GUI are an integral part of an application, GUIs are not inherently easier to use than command line interfaces.