UI design: Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater
A good place to review the fundamentals of good user design before you jump into the new world of capacitive touch, gesture, hover and 3D user interfaces is, of course, on Embedded.com. In this week’s Embedded.com Tech Focus report on "Rethinking User Interface Design," are gathered together some of the recent columns design articles, company technical papers and webinars on various aspects of UI design, both new and old.
In addition, out of Embedded.com’s 20-year knowledge base, there are several design resources several I can recommend as my Editor’s Top Picks because they deal with new design principles that you should have to make sure they are in your repertoire of UI skills, including:
Expanding resources streamline the creation of “Machines that See”
Understanding the new user interface design rules
Wave hello to the natural user interface
User expectations and standards-based application platforms
Gesture recognition--first step toward 3D UIs
There are also a number of other older, but still relevant user interface articles from which fundamental principles of good UI design can be derived, including:
Interfacing the User
Put the user in the driver's seat
Usability for Graphical User Interfaces
To err is human: teaching a GUI good manners
Design user interfaces for cooperating devices
And even when the UI you’ve designed does everything it should, many of the new alternatives, such as those based capacitive touch sensors, may be ruled out because of the environment in which they must operate. For example, because of the nature of the touch sensor environment, such things as electrostatic discharge and electromagnetic interference are now only a fingertip away from your system’s electronics. Four recent articles on Embedded.com that deal with such issues include:
Understand EMI sources in touchscreens
A standards-based approach to capacitive-sensor EMC problems
Design capacitive touch systems for robustness
Writing drivers for common touch-screen interface hardware
There are many new UI design modalities being investigated that will further test the ability of embedded system designers to balance the new with the old. I would like to hear from you about your challenges and how you addressed them.
Embedded.com Site Editor Bernard Cole is also editor of the twice-a-week Embedded.com newsletters as well as a partner in the TechRite Associates editorial services consultancy. He welcomes your feedback. Send an email to bccole@acm.org, or call 928-525-9087.
See more articles and column like this one on Embedded.com. Sign up for the Embedded.com newsletters. Copyright © 2013 UBM--All rights reserved.
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