Chapter Introduction | Web Resources | Assignment comments | Teaching Materials

 

www.baddesigns.com
This site shows a set of bad designs for 'interactive' products, from filing cabinets to coffee machines, from car panels to traffic lights, and explains why they are bad. You might like to look at them yourself first and see what you think of them.

www.dgp.utoronto.ca/~hunt/telechi/hcitools.html
Here you'll find a huge number of further links on usability, interface design, guidelines, web design etc. Unfortunately some of the links are no longer available, but there are many that are still active, and they lead to Mac interface guidelines, Windows guidelines, Alert Box (Jakob Nielsen's site), AskTog, and many others. Watch out though for sites that are not currently being maintained.

http://jthom.best.vwh.net/usability/usable.htm
This contains a comprehensive set of information about techniques and tools for interaction design.

www.microsoft.com/hwdev/windowsxp/downloads/
In chapter 8 we talk about commercial style guides. As an example of this, guidelines for developers of Windows XP applications are available for download from this site (the files aren't very big). They include sections about designing icons and screen widgets to make them compatible with the XP style. If you have the resources available, it would be an educational exercise to try and develop some software based on these guidelines. If you don't have the resources, then putting together some paper-based prototypes would also be instructive.