Interface Design

Designing simple views of complex systems

Where humans and computers meet is one of the most interesting areas in Information Technology. If a shaped flint tied to a stick stands at the base of humans' technological evolution, the personal computer is somewhere near the top for the sheer diversity of tasks that can be performed with it. However, despite its great standing, one can often feel like hitting a computer with a useful stone axe when poor software design reduces it to nothing more than a grey, uncompromising box.

The fault of poor software design often lies in the interface. Software performs tasks - for example running a sales report or taking a turn at chess, but it is generally limited once you step outside its programmed parameters; it breaks, or it cannot adapt. A good interface design should support the software and support the user’s mental model of how the tasks they are trying to perform are organized.

Human Computer Interaction (HCI)

Human Computer Interaction studies teach us how we can build better interfaces. Computers have been in use for over 50 years now and in this time the study of HCI has been able to give us guidelines and principles for interface design, e.g.:

Provide Feedback - the progress bar at the bottom of your web browser window is an example of feedback; when a page loads it moves from empty to full reassuring you that something is happening.
Support Error Recovery - humans make mistakes and a good interface should provide support for this; when you delete a file in Windows you will be asked, “Are you Sure?”

At the heart of a good interface design process is a thorough understanding of the problem domain that the user works in. At ViS, rather than impose taxonomies of information and tasks on users, we ask our clients how they visualize their systems being organized, how they see processes and the order of the tasks that they perform.