As designers, how can we determine whether the design we created is useable by the user? Design guidelines and principles are required to assess the usability of the design. The principles that assist usability can be broadly classified into three categories:
Learnability
Flexibility
Robustness
Interactive design flexibility elucidates how a user and a system exchange information.
The usability of an interactive system can be enhanced by applying the following defined flexibility principles to the system design:
There are two distinct types of dialogs, depending on who initiated them, which are as follows:
When the system controls the flow of the dialog, the dialog is said to be system preemptive.
The dialog is considered user preemptive when the user controls the flow.
Generally, the user preemptive dialog is preferred, while some situations necessitate system preemptive dialog. A middle ground between these two extremes is typically the most satisfactory choice.
A thread can be viewed as a dialog component inside a user interface that enables the process of completing a task. Multi-threading within an interface allows for the execution of numerous processes simultaneously.
Multi-threading can be described as follows:
An interleaved system allows working on a single task at a time. For example, a word processor enables numerous documents to be open, but only one can be performed at any given moment.
A concurrent system allows numerous processes to be performed simultaneously. For example, while browsing, one can stream, search, and download concurrently.
Task migratability refers to task execution responsibility between the user and the system.
A good example is a computerized spell checker. It is a waste of time for a user to verify and correct a lengthy document manually. Allowing a spell-checker program to perform this operation without the user's assistance is deemed dangerous.
The extent to which an application permits equivalent input and output values to be substituted for each other is referred as substitutivity.
Do not force users to refer to objects (files, photos, documents) by name if they can point to them as the following:
In order to meet the user's needs, customization refers to the user interface modification by the system or the user.
There are two forms of customization:
Adaptability means the ability of the user to modify the interface in accordance with their requirements.
Adaptivity refers to the system's capacity to alter the interface based on the user's needs by identifying them as novice or expert.
The flexibility-usability tradeoff is related to the famous adage "jack of all trades, master of none." Flexible designs can carry out more functions than specialized designs, but they do it in a less efficient manner. Flexible designs are more complex than inflexible designs, and as a result, they're often more challenging to use.
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