The Four Keys To Good Design

The points here are stolen from The Design of Everyday Things which you should definitely purchase from the publisher.

There are four major design aspects that all interfaces should have, many already exist in the physical world due to physical processes, but need to be replicated in the visual world for users to feel in control and comfortable.

Visibility

At all times, the user should be able to quickly see what is going on and what options they have.

• Change icons when a process is running 
• Give timers estimating how much time is left 
• Gray out options that can't be chosen 
• Give context-sensitive menus for a given context one of the best I've seen here is the Adobe Flash Designer whose entire bottom toolbox changed based upon what you had selected, yet it was still predictable.

A Good Conceptual Model

This is one of the biggest issues with design, especially in complex systems that could never be made in the physical world.

Email is a nice example, you open an "Inbox" and read "Mail" that was "Sent" to you. Of course, you don't want to tell your users that email is mail, otherwise you end up with the dreaded "Please email me back the file, I sent you the only copy I have".

But the abstraction does remove doubt from the user's mind that the process is stable and will work, even if it doesn't work in the way that they believe or you portray.

Good Mappings

Every action should have an immediate and visible response, if the user presses "Send", don't wait on the message screen until the message is sent to return the user to the Inbox. Show the user what happened whenever they do something so they can build relations in their mind about what that is doing in software.

Feedback

It doesn't matter so much that your software does computation, it just needs to inform the user of that or keep the user occupied while it is doing it; much in the same way that Mac OSX 10.6 shows an intro video: All new operating system installs need to do routine checks and get themselves in order, but there is surely a better way than this:

HOWTO Quickly Create PHP Forms with phpMyEdit

One of the biggest hassles of building a site in PHP is that there is no way to easily generate forms for your database. The same is true for most systems, CRUD mechanisms take most of the design time, even when the core logic is simple.

In PHP there is a simple program called phpMyEdit that takes the time out of creating these forms. Unfortunately, it is rather old and only works with MySQL, but for most projects that is what you need.

To Setup

1. Download phpMyEdit
2. Extract the contents in to the directory of your site.
3. Go to: http://example.com/phpMyEdit-5.1/phpMyEditSetup.php replacing 5.1 with your version of phpMyEdit.
4. Enter your database credentials and server.
5. Choose your database.
6. Choose your fields.
7. Create the form!

You'll want to secure the forms, of course, behdind something that checks for administrator rights, but that is about it!

Hacking Respondus LockDown Browser 2.0

It has been about a year since I've visited this topic, and I've decided that it is indeed worth revisiting. But first, a few reasons that I'm doing this so nobody gets the wrong idea:

• To prove Respondus LockDown Browser does not circumvent cheating
• To encourage anyone left using this technology to change their assessment methodology to other means, such as projects because:
  • They are more effective
  • It is just as easy to determine if a student cheated
  • They test ability to apply instead of memorization (life is open book, what you need to know is how to apply what you know!)
• To boost blog viewership (I write to be read, and Respondus is one of my most read posts)

The Technique

I have devised a better way of "hacking" Respondus that does not involve the use of monitoring system calls, although that would be equally viable and was what I had originally intended to do.
This version works better, is cleaner, and anyone can edit it when it stops working. Essentially, it just modifies Respondus' window and opens other programs with button presses.

How To Run

1. Download the code, and save it to a file on your desktop called Respondus.ahk
2. Download and install Auto Hot Key
3. Close all other windows on your desktop.
4. Right click the Respondus.ahk file and choose "Run As Administrator"

Code tested on Windows 8/XP. You might need to change the first line in 64 bit versions of Windows 7/Vista to reflect another path to LockDown.exe.

Code

Run, C:\Program Files\Respondus LockDown Browser\LockDown.exe

WinWait, Respondus LockDown Browser
WinSet, AlwaysOnTop, Off, Respondus LockDown Browser
WinSet, Enable, , Respondus LockDown Browser


Gui, Add, Button, default, &Show IE
Gui, Add, Button, default, &Hide Respondus
Gui, Add, Button, default, &Show Respondus
Gui, Add, Button, default, &Maximize All
Gui, Show,, Subversion Menu

WinSet, AlwaysOnTop, On, Subversion Menu
return

ButtonShowIE:
Run, IEXPLORE.EXE http://onehourhacks.blogspot.com
WinWait, One Hour Hacks - Windows Internet Explorer
WinMove, One Hour Hacks - Windows Internet Explorer, , (A_ScreenWidth/2), 0, (A_ScreenWidth/2), (A_ScreenHeight),,
return

ButtonHideRespondus:
WinHide, Respondus LockDown Browser
return

ButtonMaximizeAll:
WinGet, WindowList, List
Loop, %WindowList%
    {
    WinMaximize, % "ahk_id " . WindowList%A_Index%
    }

WinHide, Respondus LockDown Browser
return

ButtonShowRespondus:
WinShow, Respondus LockDown Browser
return

ButtonLeftSideRespondus:
WinMove, Respondus LockDown Browser, , 0, 0, (A_ScreenWidth/2), (A_ScreenHeight),,
return

ButtonFullScreenRespondus:
WinMove, Respondus LockDown Browser, , 0, 0, (A_ScreenWidth), (A_ScreenHeight),,
return

GuiClose:
ExitApp

The Case Against Customizability

Three words on building customizability in to your product: don't do it. This is to the products that allow users to change colors, organize panels, choose icons, etc.

Users have a hard enough time with finding functionality

Watch your technophobic family members try to attach an image to an email. While you may have no problem getting through menus to do it, they often do. Remember: there are more of them than us.
Customizability just gets in the way for super-users because they have better ways of doing it.

Your Product is a Tool, Not a Piece of Art

Your goal as a designer should be to minimize the amount of time on your software because it should just work.
Get your users back to the real world where they can go create art or enjoy it.

Troubleshooting/Documenting is Hard With Customizability

When you write tutorials, it is easy when everything is the same. Customizability makes it harder to follow tutorials, especially if the writer has a custom setup.
Users will also find it harder to help one another, which means more support is needed from you!

It Leads to Messy Code

Just think about rearranging components on the web, you need a place to save the information, a new server interface for submitting it, security procedures over that to make sure it isn't an attack vector, another library user-side to test in every browser.

Most of the Users Will Never Do It

Take BlackBoard for example, I TA a bit, and of all the students I've seen pull up blackboard, not one of them has changed the style or layout as they're allowed to; nobody wants to spend the time on a product they use twice a day.

Your time is better spent on usability

iGoogle was a great example of this, instead of needing a homepage like they used to, users can now just type what they want in to the search box and get information relevant to them.
Spend your time figuring out why users would need to customize, and eliminating that need.

Final Note

I'm not advocating that you throw everything in to code, no no! I fully support MVC, that is how superusers can change your environment to suit them best. If you must allow user tweaks to your software, like moving around menus, put it in a plugin so when your code gets updated, the whole software doesn't break.