Software, Tools, Or Techniques For UI Review?

Comatose51 writes "Does the Slashdot crowd know of any software, tools, or even techniques for reviewing the UI of an application? Right now at our company this is a long and arduous task of looking at slide after slide of pages and menus from our UI, and taking notes and arguing over what should go where or how the UI elements should behave and interact with the user. It takes many, many hours to do this and with all our UI developers involved, it adds up. This has to be a common and recurring problem so there must be a better way to do this. If there is open source software to help, great, but any helpful suggestion would be appreciated."

Comments

Apple Human Interface Guidelines

[Foofoobar]

Perhaps the most comprehensive guide out there. Not a GUI but if you want a GUI, use Xcode. http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/AppleHIGuidelines/XHIGIntro/chapter_1_section_1.html

CUA/CUI specs

[RobertM1968]

There are CUA guidelines for various operating systems. You can check out that documentation to determine where what components/options you have should be placed. They are pretty thorough.

IBM's was written in 1987, and updated since (and followed for the most part in the Windows and OS/2 world).

Microsoft's has of course recently changed with the advent of Vista and related v2007 programs.

For broadest use, I would choose the specs used in later versions of Windows for Windows based apps... for Linux, I am not sure where you would check - but am sure some sort of guidelines should exist someplace.

A place with links and references to IBM's CUA can be found here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_User_Access

From there, or with similar searches, you can find references for related Windows CUA stuff

Joel Spolsky's writings

[Stormwave0]

While it's not a tool, Joel Spolsky has written a long and detailed series of articles on how to correctly design a user interface. It's worth your time to check it out, even if it doesn't speed things up.

Here's the first chapter

Re:Just Use It

[sm62704]

useit.com, Jacob Nielson's site. Everyone having anything to do with interface design should read the whole thing.

Re:Guerilla user testing

[Tragek]

And an app designed to help: http://silverbackapp.com/

Usability Engineering anyone?

[Light303]

i habe been reading /. for quite a time now and never read the word "usability" ever. (i think most FOSS guys also never heard of it)

Interface Usability is a whole science. There are plenty of books describing exactly what you are trying to reinvent!

For a start you might want to check out Jakob Nielsen's Alterbox Website, which is full of small articles regarding common usability problems.

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/ ... and if you like his style of writing you might also want to buy his book "Usability Engineering" (which is a must-have when you work in the field of usability IMHO)

Re:Well, there's your problem.

[matrix mechanic]

Also, for all your developers, do you have a designer? UI development = graphic design + industrial/interaction design. Read Magic Ink: Information Software and the Graphical Interface

Simple is often best

[viking80]

1. Define what the software should do
2. Make the UI, even a mockup will do
3. Invite users to test drive the UI while video taping
(See (1) and ask the user to do each one(with no help))
4. Measure the users success (clicks, wrong clicks etc)
5. Score each screen with the predefined metric from (1) filled inn in (4)

Done.

Often the real problem is that nobody really knows (1): what the software should do. Marketing thinks it is "one click purchase" and engineering thinks it is "fully configurable shopping view". So agree on 1 first, and maybe your problems go away.