Welcome back, the topic for this video is an introduction to the concept of User Interface Hall of Fame/Hall of Shame. What do we mean by this? This topic is really based around the power of specificity of looking at particular examples of good and bad designs. And developing a habit of observation, of noticing whether something is really good, bad, easy to use or hard to use, and then developing a set of analytic tools. To help us understand why something is good or bad, and what makes it good or bad. Now, I'm going to begin by illustrating this concept with some simple, real-world non-computer examples. About as simple as you can get, namely Doors. And these examples are based on ideas introduced by Don Norman in his book Design of Every Day Things. Now I'm showing you a picture, let's call this Door #1, it's a door that leads from my building at the University of Minnesota to the adjacent building. And the question I have when I look at this door, and I want you to think of this, is do you think I open this door, Door #1, by pulling or pushing on it? Okay, you can think about that a minute. And then here's door number two. This is the door that leads back from the adjacent building into my building. Do you think I push or pull Door#2 to open it? Now if you want you could go look back at Door #1, look at Door #2, again, and after you've given this a little thought. I can tell you that when I've shown these examples to my classes at the University of Minnesota about a third to a half of the students guess wrong. Well, maybe I'm not playing fair, maybe there's no problem here. So let's look closer here, if you look back to Door #1, you can see that somebody taped up a sign that says push to open it. And if you look at Door #2, somebody taped up a sign that says pull to open. So maybe everything's actually okay. Maybe figuring out how to open a door is a hard problem, and you need science to help out. But before you decide about this, let's look at another door. Let's call this Door #3. How about this one? Do you push or pull this door to open it? Well when I show this example in my class, it's pretty much everybody guesses right. You push Door #3 to open it. And if you take away that little graphic I had up, you can see that there are no need for instructions on Door #3. We can answer then the question I asked before, doors should not need instructions. Simple things should be simple to operate and if you need to provide instructions that's a sign of failure. It's a sign of bad design and there are design principles that can help us avoid failures like this. A powerful and simple one is visibility. The possible operations of these systems or on other artifact should be visible and their purpose in how you use the object should be clear. Now this course is primarily about the design of user interfaces for computer systems. So let's take a look to be sure there's design principles that apply there as well. So here on this slide, you can see a very simple example. I brought up a menu from Microsoft Powerpoint. I had typed in some text, is this a good design feature? I had selected the text design feature, then I clicked on the Font Color Picker tool. And I hovered the cursor over red, the standard color red. And notice all the small visual changes PowerPoint has made. The color of the selected text designed feature, has been changed to red. There is a small highlight around the red square under standard colors, to indicate that is what I’m hovering over. And the word red has popped up. So now all of those subtle forms of feedback that you might not even notice are there to let me know. That the system is reacting to what I'm doing and how it's interpreting what I'm doing. Now this is an example of another important design principle, feedback, and the use of feedback, as I just showed you, made that a good design. The system provided visual clues or indicators that showed as I said how it was reacting to the user's actions and even let me know as a user that it was reacting to my actions. Now, we'll cover these and other design principles in detail in this course. These are scientifically-based principles for analyzing and creating good designs, and we'll often base our learning around examples, both bad and good. And that is where the notion of hall of fame, good designs, hall of shame, bad designs comes in. They'll help us illustrate and practice these design principles and concepts, and habits of observation that we'll be learning throughout this course. And that was it for our introduction to User Interface Hall of Fame, Hall of Shame and that's all until next time.
