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An Optimized GUI Based On Users' Abilities

Posted by Soulskill on from the how-about-a-difficulty-slider dept.

Ostracus writes "Researchers at the University of Washington have recently developed a system, which, for the first time, offers an instantly customizable approach to user interfaces. Each participant in the program is placed through a brief skills test, and then a mathematically-based version of the user interface optimized for his or her vision and motor abilities is generated. The current off-the-shelf designs are especially discouraging for the disabled, the elderly and others who have trouble controlling a mouse, because most computer programs have standardized button sizes, fonts, and layouts, which are designed for typical users."

6 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. Let me help by djupedal · · Score: 5, Funny

    "Ok, Sir...now, just press any key..."
    "...?"
    "Sir...?"
    "...sorry, I can't find the 'any' key..."

    1. Re:Let me help by impaledsunset · · Score: 5, Funny

      As a user, I'm politely asking to stop making fun of me. It was only once that you, software designers, made us stupid with this any key thing. Do I have to remind you of your muffs, you know, things like "Keyboard not found, press F1 to continue?" I'm sure we scored more than you at this game!

  2. Tech support by Ma8thew · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This will make tech support a lot more fun.

  3. Existing support for scaling the UI by dleigh · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I have athralgia which prevents me from using a mouse. I rely heavily on keyboard shortcuts but use a trackball as a pointing device. I often find GUI buttons are too small and easily overshot - and the worst offenders often have dialogs without any support for keyboard shortcuts. InfraActive comes to mind - they even removed keyboard shortcuts between versions 7 and 8. Button scaling in many apps breaks the layout, or doesn't even work. While this is a interesting and useful development, I don't see anything changing soon on the disability usability front. There is existing support in common OSs for making global UI changes, but most apps ignore/override these settings or just break horribly because the UI developer didn't design the interface to adapt to these sort of changes.

  4. Microsoft already tried this by joelholdsworth · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Microsoft already tried this with sort of thing with Office 2000-2003. Remember infrequently used menu and toolbar items being hidden away? I do, and shudder. It made teaching people how to use it a total nightmare. Even using it as an expert user always felt clumsy.

    Good UI is not about making a UI that learns the user - a computer will never be able to do a good job of that. Good UI is about making the app easily learnable. This is much easier than it sounds: simple tidyness and consistency get you 80% of the way toward good UI. But when you start making dynamic UI, consistency is the first thing to go out the window.

    Office 2007 does this quite well (though it is themed differently to all other apps), and so it's much easier to work with than any previous versions of office.

    1. Re:Microsoft already tried this by GeckoAddict · · Score: 5, Informative

      If anyone is interested, Microsoft had a pretty interesting presentation at MIX that they posted on the web. They talk about all the usability and UI research that they did on Office 2003 that caused them to develop the ribbon for 2007, and then they spend some time talking about how they came up with the idea and worked out the details of the ribbon.

      It's an interesting presentation if you work on UI design and have some time, or are curious as to why the hell they went to the ribbon.