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Designing with the Mind in Mind. Simple Guide to Understanding User Interface Design Rules

  • Book

  • May 2010
  • Elsevier Science and Technology
  • ID: 1759509

Early user interface (UI) practitioners were trained in cognitive psychology, from which UI design rules were based. But as the field evolves, designers enter the field from many disciplines. Practitioners today have enough experience in UI design that they have been exposed to design rules, but it is essential that they understand the psychology behind the rules in order to effectively apply them. In Designing with the Mind in Mind, Jeff Johnson, author of the best selling GUI Bloopers, provides designers with just enough background in perceptual and cognitive psychology that UI design guidelines make intuitive sense rather than being just a list of rules to follow.

Table of Contents

1. We Perceive What We Expect
2. Our Vision is Optimized to See Structure
3. We Seek and Use Visual Structure
4. Reading is Unnatural
5. Our Color Vision is Limited
6. Our Peripheral Vision is Poor
7. Our Attention is Limited; Our Memory is Imperfect
8. Limits on Attention, Shape, Thought and Action
9. Recognition are Easy; Recall is Hard
10. Learning from Experience and Performing Learned Actions are Easy; Problem Solving and Calculation are Hard
11. Many Factors Affect Learning
12. We Have Time Requirements

Authors

Jeff Johnson President and Principal Consultant, UI Wizards, Inc.. Jeff Johnson is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of San Francisco. He is also a principal at Wiser Usability, a consultancy focused on elder usability. After earning B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Yale and Stanford, he worked as a UI designer, implementer, manager, usability tester, and researcher at Cromemco, Xerox, US West, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun. He has taught at Stanford, Mills, and the University of Canterbury. He is a member of the ACM SIGCHI Academy and a recipient of SIGCHI's Lifetime Achievement in Practice Award. He has authored articles on a variety of topics in HCI, as well as the books GUI Bloopers (1st and 2nd eds.), Web Bloopers, Designing with the Mind in Mind (1st and 2nd eds.), Conceptual Models: Core to Good Design (with Austin Henderson), and Designing User Interfaces for an Aging Population (with Kate Finn).