[Usability] Suggested Holiday Reading

[Bryan W Clark <clarkbw clarkson edu>]

Hi ~

Just thought all you usability minded people might like some holiday
reading to print off and take with you wherever you're headed.  Sorry if
I haven't replied to other messages, I've been busy reading and zapping
bugs.


"Promoting Universal Usability with Multi-Layer Interface Design" -  Ben
Shneiderman, Proceedings of the 2003 conference on Universal usability
2003

Ben presented this paper at a recent ACM conference on Universal
Usability[1], Universal Usability is somewhat of a hot topic right now
and Ben explains why in the paper. I found a free download [2] for this
paper so you don't need to have ACM access; just had to go straight to
the source.

My thoughts:

Universal Usability in my own words means creating interfaces that
dynamically satisfy the needs of users who interact with the software at
different levels.  I believe the idea has great merit for extending
usability beyond just the ease of use for first time software users. 
The paper talks about how users start out at layer one of the interface,
then as they become more accustomed to the software the interface
(gracefully) reveals level two, and so on.  This gives the new user a
good experience learning the software with most options and buttons
hidden while they are not aware of the effects of those functions.  When
the user becomes more comfortable with the level of functionality more
functionality becomes available.  Deciding when this switch of levels
happens is of course a difficult thing to do.  

This is something I'm trying to adapt into gnome-blog. GNOME-blog has
many requests for people to be able to post to different categories or
multiple blogs at the same time.  While I want to add that functionality
in there for people, it's technically very difficult since we'd muck up
the interface for those who don't have 8 different blogs to post to. 
With a multi-layer interface approach we could present the simplified
layer interface of the gnome-blog to those who have only one blog in
their configuration.  As people add more blog sites to their
configurations we add in the buttons to the edit/preference windows to
handle the extra needs.  This could satisfy our desire for a simple blog
applet while also providing advanced functionality for those tricked out
bloggers like jdub. 

A concern of this of course is the software design, having multiple
layers of interfaces for different types of users could prove to be too
much to handle in design and debug.  We'll see what's possible over
break.

Happy Holidays,
~ Bryan

[1] http://www.acm.org/sigs/sigchi/cuu2003/program.htm
[2]
ftp://ftp.cs.umd.edu/pub/hcil/Reports-Abstracts-Bibliography/2003-33html/ACM-CUU2003.pdf