| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Part I of Designing From Both Sides of the Screen describes the goal you're trying to achieve when building technology. The first excerpt, On Being a Butler defines cooperative technology and describes some principles underlying good interaction design. The second excerpt, Don't Impose explains one of those design principles (Treat Clicks as Sacred) and gives many examples of technology that exemplifies or violates that principle. The goal of Part 1 is to help you recognize cooperative technology when you see it. It's one thing to recognize cooperative technology, it's another to know how to create it yourself — especially when you have to balance that goal against many other goals and constraints. Part 2 of the book explains how to do that. It walks through the process we used to design and build a real application called Hubbub, which runs on wireless Palms and PCs. By working with a real example, we are able to explain how to handle the many tradeoffs that emerge in practice. We believe that how you handle those tradeoffs determines how cooperative your technology will be. The UI Structure excerpt explains how you can work with a list of requirements and figure out how to structure the user interface. It explains how you decide where to put each feature and how to present it. The last excerpt, Initial Development, focuses on the initial development phase, when the engineers are writing a lot of code to implement the design specified in the UI Spec. During this phase, the collaboration between the designer and engineer is critical because it determines how gracefully you handle the many usability-related issues that arise once the technology starts to come to life. This excerpt illustrates several issues that arose when the system could not be implemented as originally deisgned and explains how we handled them. |
(c) 2002 Ellen Isaacs and Alan Walendowski
