Yearly Archives: 2013

Confidence Intervals and Usability Testing

Measuring the User Experience, by Tom Tullis and Bill Albert, talks about the use of “Confidence Intervals” within usability testing. The authors describe Confidence Intervals as “a range that estimates the true population value for a statistic.” It comes across as a better way of obtaining more accurate testing results without having to greatly increase…

Steve Job’s Impact on User Interface Design

Steve Jobs’ impact on user interface design and the user experience industry is incredible. The emphasis and importance that Jobs and Apple have put on extremely user-friendly design can’t be overstated in terms of the ripple effect it has had throughout user interface design firms worldwide. That his vision and philosophy towards design has created…

User Interface quotations

Think good design is expensive? Just wait and see what bad design ends up costing you. -karj23 Good design is good business. -Thomas J Watson I’ve been amazed at how often those outside the discipline of design assume that what designers do is decoration. Good design is problem solving. -Jeffery Veen

Persuasive Design and User Experience Design

Persuasive Design is described as “the use of psychology in design to influence behavior” through persuasion and social influence instead of coercion. It’s an intriguing idea in that User Research helps to understand behavior and User Interface design generally enables behavior. There is the belief that Persuasive Design is the next step in using design…

User Interface Design patterns

Smashing Magazine provides a thorough look into common UI patterns and their importance in creating an effective and successful user interface and user experience. The idea of design patterns was first introduced in the 1960s by an architect named Christopher Alexander. These design patters provided solutions to reoccurring problems–and thus UI design patterns are solutions…

Muscle memory and User Interface Design

Placement consistency of graphics in a user interface system not only helps users learn the system, it helps their muscles “learn” the system as well. A user’s constant and continual use of a product’s UI causes their muscles to “memorize” certain movements and actions. For example, when a user’s muscle memory tells them that the…

Smaller Medical devices and User-Centered Design

Increasing healthcare costs have been one of the main components in the miniaturization of medical devices. Much like employees who telecommute, patients are now being treated in their homes more and more. The User Interface systems for these devices will need to consider a patient and technician-centered approach as well as clinician-centered, with the user…

Ergonomics and mobile UI Design

The majority of modern mobile devices and smartphones utilize touch screens, providing both unique opportunities and constraints for UI Designers. As a result, designers and their clients should consider the ergonomics of using mobile devices, including gestures and transitions. Device dimensions, the way a user holds a device and touches the screen, and especially gestures…

Areteworks to be at MD&M West 2013

Medical Design & Manufacturing West is one of the most wide-ranging MedTech Conference in the industry. Areteworks will be attending, with hundreds of MedTech leaders and practitioners worldwide, sharing best practices and innovative ways to transform the future of medical devices. Join us this February 11 – 14 at booth 504 and let us show…

User Interface Design quotations

“The public is more familiar with bad design than good design. It is, in effect, conditioned to prefer bad design, because that is what it lives with. The new becomes threatening, the old reassuring.”-Paul Rand “The old computing was about what computers could do; the new computing is about what users can do. Successful technologies…

Defining a “clean” User Interface design

When a user interface design is defined as “clean”, it indicates an interface that is uncluttered, with appropriate spacing between graphical elements and an obvious visual hierarchy. It will be one that utilizes an aesthetically pleasing color palette and contains the perfect balance of text and graphics. Further, a “clean” UI will minimize redundancy while…

Sketching and its importance in User Interface Design

For some, sketching may seem like an unnecessary step in the process of creating an effective User Interface solution. However, the utilization of sketching at the beginning of UI development can contain a lot of conceptual detail and opportunities for refinement. Sketching keeps the UI from entering the mockup stage prematurely and missing these important…