Part 1 of this article has pointed out that the false doctrine to restrict menu items, bullet points etc. to seven is based on a misreading of Miller (1956). Contemporary research shows that capacity limitations do indeed exist, but these are currently estimated to lie at about four items. Recently, as a reaction to the oversimplified propagation of the “magical number seven”, the opposite opinion has become increasingly popular: Its proponents argue that there actually is no reliable capacity limitation at all or that—if there is such a limitation—it is not relevant for UI design. If these critics were right, also the new “magical” number 4±1 would be of only minor importance for UI design. I argue that this position throws out the baby with the bath water; although it is advisable to be suspicious of magical numbers and other oversimplified rules, capacity limitations are a psychological fact and indeed relevant for UI design. As is often the case, the truth lies somewhere in the middle…
read more…

There are several apparently axiomatic design principles that purport to be perfectly adjusted to the human cognitive system. Their prominent characteristics are that they are broadly applicable and easy to grasp for the psychological layperson. Unfortunately, however, they are usually false. One of these principles is the “magical number seven”. Very loosely based on an influential article by Miller (1956), this “magical” number provides designers with an easy guideline to estimate how many elements their products can maximally contain without overcharging the cognitive capabilities of their users. Generations of designers were forced to limit, for example, steps in a workflow, tabs, items in dropdown lists, links, choices, bulleted lists, radio buttons and checkboxes, to this apparently magical number (cf., e.g., Eisenberg, 2004). As every myth, there is also some truth to the “magical number seven”. I here give a brief overview of some aspects of research on cognitive capacity limitations from a basic experimental psychological perspective. Although the here discussed insights are not as magically applicable as some would like, the present overview might be of use for the interested UI designer.
read more…

This article was inspired by two interesting days at the GUI&Design conference that took place just recently on 8th and 9th December in Fürth, Germany. The conference audience consisted of professional user experience designers and developers and the talks and workshops focused on Microsoft user interface technologies such as WPF and Silverlight.

Not only this article is a spontaneous creation – one of the activities I participated in during the conference was, too: Clemens Lutsch, User Experience Evangelist at Microsoft, asked me to join a discussion panel in order to conclude the first conference day and discuss concepts and roles in the UX domain with regard to aspects that are challenges in our daily professional work.

For me this was an excellent opportunity to discuss a term that we have introduced at Centigrade a couple of months ago: “user interface design engineering” or a bit shorter “UI design engineering”. Having used the term just internally in the first place, we started to bring it up in conversations with our clients and partner companies more and more frequently – with great acceptance. When I brought up the term during the panel discussion, I observed similar acceptance from the audience and my co-speakers – almost as if the term closed a gap that many professionals felt has existed for quite some time. It was even picked up by other conference speakers, right the next day, which motivated me to shed some more light on the term and its meaning. So, what is UI design engineering, anyway?

read more…

Texts are important parts of most user interfaces, be it, e.g., as form field labels or longer help texts. This article is aimed at providing a common introduction to the topic „choosing the right font”. It contains some hints an pointers that simplify the search for the right typeface. read more…

The first part of this article provided an overview of the concepts of the currently implemented user interfaces for the Kinect™ sensor. It pointed out technical specifications and explained the human-machine interaction within Kinect games. This second part now scrutinizes this interaction and assesses its potential for industrial application.
read more…

In November 2010, Microsoft® introduced Kinect™. As an expansion of the Xbox 360™ gaming console, it brings controller-free gaming to the living room and even long before its actual release it was believed to revolutionize Human Computer Interaction. Therefore, expectations were rather high and one felt reminded of the Natural User Interface (NUI) featured in the movie Minority Report. Will this futuristic vision soon become reality?
read more…

To our great delight and surprise, our animated Facility Manager Prototype and respective Blog article was used as demonstration and reference material at UXCamp Europe 2011. In regard of the apparent interest in the topic this article picks up the issue yet again, focusing on scientific considerations of the past years.
Indeed, animations have become an integral part in today’s modern applications, especially the iPhone and Co. Having this said, it astonishes that scientific efforts are still in fledgling stages and that the few existing approaches vaguely draw upon techniques and rules used for cartoon movies. At the same time however, choosing the wrong animation will literally paralyze a User Interface.
read more…

Comparing computer games with “serious” software applications may seem like comparing apples and oranges if we think of serious software as tools that allow users to achieve mission-critical productivity goals in their working live. In this respect, the two industries couldn‘t be further apart regarding their target audience and the way they rank productivity vs. fun. For this reason, we are oftentimes asked why Centigrade as a “serious” user interface design company collaborates so closely with the game industry and even has a branch office located in a building that’s otherwise occupied solely by game development studios.

Yet, the link between computer games and industrial software is more obvious than one may think. To summarize why we believe computer games can have a positive impact on the user experience (UX) of industrial software applications, this three-part blog post provides a bulleted list of ten arguments we keep on stating in this regard. The first part gives a high-level and process-oriented perspective on the topic, the second part will shed more light on the transfer of aesthetic and interactive aspects found in games to serious software and the third part will have a look at the game industry as a technical driver for innovations that spill over to other software industries.

read more…

Corporate design guidelines aim at ensuring a coherent and consistent corporate identity. User interface guidelines (or UI guidelines) work in a similar fashion. They provide a set of rules for designing a software’s user interface. This applies to visual design as well as to interaction design. Ideally, adhering to these rules guarantees a basic quality of applications that run on the same operating system and avoids an “application zoo”-scenario.
read more…

Interacting via touch is on everyone’s lips. Nevertheless, many companies shy away from reorganizing their applications respectively, because touch screen interactions require different concepts and can accompany huge restructuring efforts and high costs. Also, such restructuring is not riskless, since touch-interaction is not the most suitable paradigm for all application scenarios. The following article presents the combo box as an example to illustrate how mouse- and touch-interaction concepts can be integrated to get the best of both worlds. The article aims at inspiring especially those of you, who appreciate mouse- and touch-operation alike.
read more…

In one of our previous blog articles we talked about the use of pie menus in touch screen interfaces and discussed pros and cons of this kind of interaction. In this article, we are going to show a concrete example of how a pie menu can be used.
read more…

In recent years, so called “natural user interfaces” (NUI) have grown in popularity. More and more often, interaction via touch and gestures is employed instead of using mouse and keyboard. The iPhone was greeted with great enthusiasm and played a major part in spreading touch screen system in the consumer market while also introduced gesture-based interaction in a playful way. There should be hardly any touch screen user who is not familiar with the pinch gesture that is used to resize or zoom images on the iPhone.
read more…