CPSC 481, instructor Sheelagh Carpendale
Contents for: CPSC 481  Notes: Section #5

Beyond Simple Screen Design

Creating good interfaces requires designers to present tasks in appropriate representations. Graphical user interfaces involve visualizing a representation, choosing appropriate metaphors, and providing good interaction techniques such as direct manipulation. While choosing good representations is somewhat of an art, there are methods to help a designer create and develop alternative designs.

Overheads

Topics covered

Required Readings

Optional Readings from Baecker Grudin Buxton and Greenberg

Videos

The visualization videos demonstrate excellent examples of information visualization through animation, fisheye views, visual changes in large overviews of the data, and dynamic queries. The metaphor videos illustrate different metaphors and approaches to representations. These videos change year by year because there are so many good ones to choose from!
Visualization Metaphors

In-class teaching tips

The presentation is fairly straight-forward. However, it is difficult to show a "recipe" for crafting good representations without seeing specific examples. To this purpose, I choose from the above videos to illustrate novel and creative interface designs and metaphors. Students tend to be quite impressed by the ideas presented in the videos.

Major sources used to prepare lecture material