Designing The User Interface book review

Designing The User Interface book review

Ben Shneiderman proposed a set of principles on that rules on the designing of the User interface, as noted in his book Designing The User Interface. He developed these rules from a set of first-hand experienced and applicable user interactive systems that have been accurately refined, extended, and interpreted. These rules are focused on also what Nielsen and Molich offered in their ten user interface Design guidelines, one similarity about both of these guidelines is that they are both focused on the desirability, utility, and usability of these designs. These guidelines have been used in numerous successful companies in their software and websites to give users the ultimate experience. Schneiderman recommends the following; striving for consistency, designing sites that enable frequent users to use shortcuts, Offering users informative feedback, and creating dialogs for yielding closure. Further, he adds that good design should offer error handling, permit reversal of unwanted actions; it should also provide an internal Locus of control, and minimize short-term memory load.

Vigen describes itself as a company that deals with branding, design, and building products and platforms. It is a static website with the intent of dynamism, which can only be seen in the contact and application forms, which unfortunately do not work at the moment. However, the primary purpose of the site is to advertise their services, as seen with the work they do, the services they offer, and the blog articles on their website. The site is mobile-responsive, it can be used on various media devices, it can be experienced by resizing the computer browser window for different device sizes, or physically testing it on the multiple devices. The navigation of the website is outstanding with the resizable hamburger menu that allows users with small screens to be able to utilize the menu contents. They have been used the use of various colors and animations for their interactivity, as one hovers around the work pages, the filter work section has a hover effect which allows content to be highlighted as you move the mouse around. The loading speed is entirely wanting as the navigation from one page to another, even with a reliable internet connection, is a bit delayed. The site implements the use of a few icons for its layout, for example, the search icon.

Color has been used a lot on the website, as there are a variety of colors for different icons, divs, paragraphs, and each page has its unique color features. However, a white smoke color background is maintained for all the pages in the site, except the articles and the search pages, which use maroon and purple colors, respectively.

I experience a few impediments while navigating through the site. One being the use of multiple colors was quite distracting, and although it made the site look good, it was inconsistent in maintaining the colors all through the website. It is justified to use three or two colors when building a website that will create attention and make the user spend more time on the site. Besides, due to different addresses, colors should be used with meaning, the designers should ensure that the color used conveys the purpose intended. however,the use of icons has been used sparingly, it can hinder navigation and proper use of the site for users who might have limitations. Icons should also be labeled inappropriate positioning to improve flow; icons simplify and make the interface more appealing, making the site easier to ease and jump to different places in the site; however, the icons should not be overused. The contact forms provided in Contact page does not work, when emailing a request to hire them, a user gets an error message citing unavailability of the service. The programmers should endure that their form submits user requests and that their service is always available to the users.

How a user navigates through a website directly affects his/her overall experience when it comes to using the site. Desired action sequence refers to the presentation of the website content in a way that allows step by step analysis, implementation, and in a direction that will enable comprehension. It may be likened to the recipe of a meal, where one step leads to another. Viget website is rich in texts and links that are well distributed on the webpage, however, from a user’s perspective and experience, that arrangement of the hypertexts links, especially on the menu, does not allow the desired action sequence. The current layout of the list is; index page, work, services, Articles, Careers, About, Contact and Search icon. As a user when you visit the site, you will expect to first know, what the website is about, what they offer, the work they have previously or currently doing, the articles they have published, whether or not they have job vacancies, how to reach to them and a tool that magnifies faster navigation(search form). Thus the web designer should change the navigation to; about (home page), services, Portfolio, Articles, Careers, Contact, and search.