Tutorials Center

How does my desktop look like….?

drlalinda — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 09:35:17 +0000

In my point of view, our computer desktop is like front yard of a house. Every time you visit home you got to go trough front yard. Therefore people spend large amount of money to keep their front yards/gardens in tidy and clean manner. So why cant we spend couple of minutes to be aware of the way we can keep our desktop tidy?

Since couple of ago, I was looking for a utility/navigation tool or a windows theme which allows us to hide all the icons from windows desktop. Few months back I came to know about the idea call Docking which is mostly available with apple operating systems. After doing 5-minute google search, I came to know we have hundreds to utility tools for windows docking. After doing couple of comparisons I realized the freeware call “RocketDock” performs well and its giving big support for my day today task.

Here we go:

These are two screen shots I took from my home use laptop and from my office use PC environment.(

Nothing is visible on my desktop other than Desktop wallpaper and Top dock (I have setup my taskbar to “Auto hide” as well).

What I do (what usability engineers do) is usually time consuming and every second is worthier than the past second. Focus, Delivery on time, Running on correct track are must and those are very hard to be maintain during all the office time. At least your track/ Road should be clear enough to run or walk….

It’s easy to work with a clean environment, rather than working with 100s of desktop icons around. So I came to know this Docking thing saved 20-30% of my time (especially the time I waste to seeking thing whole through the my own computer)

Performance wise RocketDock is totally ok with me even with all of my day-today computer related tasks. Here is what displays by my task manager;

Do you know what is the most interesting bit…?

Most of my co-workers inquire about this tool. They simply say “WOW, Look at your desktop. What the hell is that on the top….?” J

I simply say….”We are UIs (User interface engineers). We should be different enough to produce different UIs. So we are different from everything….lol”

Credit goes to RocketDock guys for implementing this kind of tool. You guys better try this out too…its simply cool..

Mistakes we do in designing web layouts

drlalinda — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 09:18:40 +0000

When person designs a layout for a web application, there are some common mistakes that he/she does. I suppose to detail few of them by this article. Practical solution will be mentioned next to the mistake.

1) Screen Resolution

When selecting a screen resolution for your design, there will be couple of factors that needs to take into consideration.

a) End-user group of the specific application (Basically, we need to be focus on their age ranges)

Higher screen resolutions reduce readability of the application components such as text content, titles or banners. So it has significant impact for most people over the age of 40.If such crowd represent considerable percentage of your target consumer group, you should take some necessary actions to avoid the issue.

Solution:

Divide consumer group to two age group such as below 40 and over 40

IF over-40 group is large in size, make sure to give some option for customizing the screen text sizes by them self.

b) Medium they use to brows your application (that can be a mobile phone, PDA or a PC…)

It obvious that’s pointless to make 1024 + screens for people use mobile phone to access the application. They will have to scroll left and right to see your entire page. I find that quite annoying.

Solution:

Have some pointing/redirecting mechanism at the beginning. Keep few multiple pages with different screen sizes and with the same content. So it’s better to direct them to a suitable page after understanding their browser capabilities.

c) Content capacity and format, which we are going to display on our application.

Its great if we can use the whole screen, when we have to display so much of data content on a single page. On the other hand its bit odd to display less data content on a large screen.

Solution:

Prepare your data in tabular format as much as possible. People find it easy to read, understand and find the data they need. And select “100%” as a table width, rather than selecting fixed width like “500px” or “800px”

If you want to your web application to be displayed readably in all resolutions, build your application with the aid of tables and set their widths in “percentages” instead of “pixels”.

For an example after setting your table width to 100%, it will take up 100% of the screen and finally users will be able see the content in maximum level of their capabilities. As far as the other UI components and layout graphics don’t have any negative impact from this adjustable method, you will be able to use this for most of the applications you make.

2) Opening new Browser Windows

This is somewhat we should avoid but its very common mistake happens from most developers hand.

What are the disadvantages?

Worst thing is users do not notice that a new window has opened. So when ever they try to go back to the previous page by using browsers back button, they will confuse by a grayed out, disabled “Back” button.

Opening new window breaks user’s operation flow. Users will need to switch back to what they were doing again. That takes couple or more seconds.

Users must be well aware of Internet browsers in order to deal with many browser windows. So first of all you will need to have an idea about the user knowledge level.

Solution is to use “Model Window” or “Model Dialog Window” for your need. Its very easy to find over the internet.

Go to google and type “Model dialog windows”, “Model windows” or “Model window samples”.It will list few free scripts to get it done.

Most of them are Javascripts related ones, so you will need to have extra glance to find out users are capable of using javascripts with their browsers.

LightBox is a good example for Model window too.

But still there is one common instance where we can use new browser window. That is when directing user to some external link, from a specific website.

What is User Interface Designing >

drlalinda — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 11:11:38 +0000

What is User Interface Designing >
As it name implies, User Interface is something that user uses for get his work done. It can be in different formats.It may be a Web application, Windows application, Mobile application or just a manual data entry form.

When designing a UI for the above, we should focus on the User group of the specific field.For an example, we may asked to develop some UI for a web application which is capable of accessing globally. For this instance,we need to make sure that whole internet users should be capable of reaching to this application.UI designer always need to keep in mind, that no matter how attractive his designs, if its not reachable or friendly usable by consumers(end users).It can be a Designing factor (such as Colours, shapes, or graphic placement) or Technical factor(such as Downloading time, File size or Screen Resolution) Whatever it is, people hair Skilled User Interface engineer to balance all plus and minus points and for reaching to the ultimate goal.