Patterns of HCI Design and Design of Patterns
Journal Title: Romanian Journal of Human - Computer Interaction - Year 2010, Vol 3, Issue 3
Abstract
User interface design patterns also called HCI or interaction or usability patterns have been introduced first as a medium to capture and represent solutions to XVHUV¶ problems. Patterns have been used also as a medium for transferring the expertise of HCI designers and usability professionals to software engineers, who are usually unfamiliar with UI design and usability principles. Design patterns have been considered also as a lingua franca for crossing cultural and professional barriers between different stakeholders. Several HCI professionals have introduced their own pattern languages with specific terminology, classification and meanings. Patterns have also been presented as building reusable blocks at different levels of granularity, which can be combined to compose new interactive systems. Despite the obvious and acclaimed potential of these pattern-driven design approaches, patterns usage has not achieved the acceptance and widespread applicability envisaged by pattern pioneers such as Christopher Alexander. This paper provides an analysis of the facts about patterns usages, pattern languages and pattern-based design approaches. Some shortcomings in the presentation and application of HCI patterns are identified and discussed under the prevailing fallacies. Based on the analysis of how patterns have used so far, we draw some recommendations and future perspectives on what can be done to address the existing shortcomings. Making patterns more accessible, easily understandable, comparable and integratable in software and HCI design tools can promote HCI patterns to claim the usability, usefulness and importance originally envisaged for the pattern-oriented design approach.
Authors and Affiliations
Ahmed Seffah
A Generic Component Approach For Dynamic Generation Of User Interfaces
In this article, we describe a new technique for dynamically generating user interfaces, used for data visualization and editing. Based on the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) specifications we propose a solution composed...
Approaches in Automatic Usability Evaluation. Comparative Study
Usability testing is a growing field with more and more companies getting aware of the importance of assuring a good usability of their products. Specialists conduct the tests and they use various kinds of tools to help...
Multi-User Interaction Meta-Model
In recent years, there has been a wide interest on how groups of people work together, and on how collaboration might be supported. Many authors, rely on Task Modeling to design collaborative information systems. Task mo...
Usability Specific Heuristics for Parallel and Distributed Aplications
The usability of the applications based on new technologies arises new issues. New evaluation methods or at least classical methods adapted to the new real case requirements have to be defined and developed. One of the m...
Challenges in Streamlining User Experience Design
As the software industry has evolved into having solutions for many of our basic needs, User Experience (UX) looks like the next big thing to invest in, especially in the enterprise world. This paper presents three de...