GUI
This post will be about GUI design. You can find whole books on design. Many designers maintain blogs about GUI's. I'm not an expert in the field but I can offer some key points to consider when designing.
- User Profiling- find out what the users what to accomplish when using your software. Make sure it fits their goals, needs, and skills.
- Principle of Metaphor- some things aren't as universally understood as you may think. How do you pause a video on YouTube? You hit the double vertical bars. How does that metaphor mean pause? It doesn't matter here. Just remember that using an icon or a metaphor may not be understood. Remember who your users are and what will make sense to them.
- Feature exposure- I can't find any support for the following story but it'll illustrate a point. I've heard that when Microsoft was working on Office 2010 they surveyed customers on features they would like to see in the new release. What they found out was that a staggering majority of the requested features already existed, users just couldn't find them. Consider these areas to help promote features.
- Toolbars
- Context Menus
- Sub menus
- Dialog windows
- Advanced settings
- Coherence- I've been reading about habits recently. Turns out people don't like new things that much. Keep your design consistent with existing things and you'll get a better reception than if you try something drastic.
- Shortcuts- Some people can't waist time clicking through 5 different menus just to apply some macro. That's why you can press Ctrl + Shift + Alt + 5835.
- Help- Have you ever tried using Windows' troubleshooting window? It would be great if it didn't suck. Make worth while help documents.
Here's my GUI for hangman. It's much different than the draft and that's OK. The draft was just a draft. This is the final and it should look better.
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| Main Menu |
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| Settings |
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| Game Screen (the clouds will animate across the sky) |
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| High Score |
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