This page contains links to extra material related to UI to supplement our book's overview. Heck, even this meager list of favorites is an overview… UI design is a course unto itself. Two rationales:

1. A little more is better than nothing.
2. You can find these links later if/when you need them

enjoy… yow, bill

Here's the money: Introduction to Apple Human Interface Guidelines. Please note the nice PDF link of the whole she-bang in the upper left.

I found that very first page interesting. It's a rationale from the UI team to other Apple developers to use these guidelines. It's important to understand that the two groups (software standards and development) are often separate and natural enemies (well, antagonists, at least). I paraphrase the rationale for developers to use Apple UI guideline standard below:

• Users learn your app faster with things they're already familiar with.
• User work faster with your app if it is well-designed.
• Users with special needs will be better able to use your app.
• Your app will have a modern, elegant appearance like other Max OS apps.
• Your app will be easier to document.
• Your app will be easier to support.
• Your app will be easier to internationalize.
• Your app will be better received by the Mac community.

For our purposes, the the most relevant material is found in:

• Chapter 1 The Design Process
• Chapter 2 Characteristics of Great Software
• Chapter 3 Human Interface Design

DUE: Please read these chapters before our Wednesday Global Warming Polar Bear Lecture. We'll discuss them in depth then. thanks… yow, bill

Well, first off, here's an important link for you. MIT offers some, many or all (I don't know which) of their course online. Here's the home page for that effort: MIT Open Courseware. I must admit I haven't used it as a resource much yet, but I should at least try. Each course seems to contain a syllabus (with books and recommended readings), the lecture notes, homeworks, exams, etc.

The course of interest to us is: User Interface Design and Implementation. I liked:

• The list of books and recommended reading in the syllabus.
• The project assignment is interesting… nice and open-ended. The final step, step 6, is to get real users to play with your system. We should do more things like that here at Noctrl. Yes?
• Check out the fun (and challenging) problems sets.

Noctrl is pretty much a Java house, and NetBeans is pretty much the IDE du jour for Java, so here's a link for you: Java GUIs and Project Matisse Learning Trail. As the web site tells you, “Project Matisse is the innovative new approach to developing a Java graphical user interface (GUI) that was introduced in NetBeans IDE 5.0.”

Fair enough. So the basic idea is, figure out what you want to do (model), hop into NetBeans, create the front-end for your GUI (view), and then plug in your Java code that actually does the stuff (control)… that's the Model-View-Controller pattern that is ubiquitous in today's GUI designs.

Click on the “Flash demos” for more help on how to actually do this in NetBeans.

You can find other GUI builders at Wikipedia page on GUI Bulders.

Finally, some links you may enjoy:

• Ten Usability Heuristics - just a top 10 list
• http://www.eclipse.org/articles/Article-UI-Guidelines/Index.html - guidelines for adding to the IDE Eclipse…
  • I like the “Best Practices” section,
  • They use tons of screen shots to show how things should be,
  • And I love the little guideline stars sprinkled throughout. They're numbered and they really standout. Then, at the end they have a “Checklist for Developers” that lists all the guideline stars in order. Very nice organization!
• Computer Science 465 - Principles of User Interface Design, Implementation and Evaluation - this is the U of I course on this topic. Another nice setup with all the lecture powerpoints available and stuff. Look at the required books:
  • “The Design of Everyday Things” by Donald Norman. I've seen this book reference at multiple sites, but I haven't read it myself.
  • “Task-Centered User Interface Design” by Clayton Lewis and John Rieman. This text-only shareware book is supposed to be available at www.hcibib.org/tcuid. I had trouble with that link though. HCIBIB stands for “human-computer interaction bibliography. The site was down when I checked.
  • “Human-computer Interaction” by Dix, Finlay, Abowd, and Beale (3rd edition).

That's it.

As I said… just an overview.

thanks… yow, bill