January 2007 Issue
Applying Color Theory to Digital Displays
Published: January 20, 2007
This article is Part III of my series “Color Theory for Digital Displays.” It describes how you can apply color theory to application program user interfaces and Web pages and provides many guidelines for the effective use of color.
For backgrounds behind text, use solid, contrasting colors, and avoid the use
of textures and patterns, which can make letterforms difficult to distinguish
or even illegible. Choose combinations of text color and background color with
care. Value contrast between body text and its background
color should be a minimum of about eighty percent.
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Category: Features
Connecting Cultures, Changing Organizations: The User Experience Practitioner As Change Agent
Published: January 20, 2007
Readers of UXmatters probably know that user-centered design (UCD) and usability activities have the most positive impact when they’re carried out early in the ideation, design, and development cycle. Probably, many of you have worked in organizations that weren’t very experienced in UCD or usability engineering. You may have experienced something like the following the interchange with a development manager.
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Category: Features
Wireframing With InDesign and Illustrator
Published: January 8, 2007
There are a variety of tools used for interaction design. I’ve used them all and have settled on a framework using InDesign® and Illustrator®. It will require a series of articles to fully describe the framework I’ve developed. So, in this article, I’m going to focus on what led to the development of this framework and give you a brief overview.
With all the wireframing tools out there like Visio®, OmniGraffle®, Illustrator, InDesign, Flash®, Fireworks®, and HTML/CSS, why create a framework based on InDesign and Illustrator? Design solutions are about context. So, let’s start there.
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Category: Features
User Assistance in the Role of Domain Expert
Published: January 8, 2007
This article explores the role of user assistance in providing domain-centric online Help—rather than Help that simply explains obvious user interactions with well-designed user interfaces—and provides a pattern for and examples of expert guidance.
It took two aha! moments for me to get the importance of providing domain expertise in Help. The first came at a conference for writers of user assistance when the technical communications manager for a company that makes home accounting software said, “My challenge isn’t teaching people how to use our software; it’s teaching carpenters how to be accountants.”
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Category: Features
Usability in China: Encore
Published: January 8, 2007
Our story starts in late 2004, at the Make the World Simpler event in Shanghai, China—a modest-sized meeting of UX professionals that was organized by the China chapters of the Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA). At this meeting, leaders of the mainland China and Hong Kong UPA chapters met to discuss organizing a usability conference in China. We decided to call the conference User Friendly.
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Category: Reviews