My name is Ethan Glasser-Camp, and I'm a Computer Science and Psychology undergraduate at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. I would like to write a HOWTO about HCI (human-computer interaction), specifically HID (human interface design). Interface design has traditionally been a weak point of Linux programmers. This proposed document would cover elementary principles of the human factors field, such as what makes a good interface (learnability, speed of use, number of keystrokes, etc.) and what techniques one can use to analyze an interface (human-computer interaction techniques such as the cognitive walkthrough to test for learnability, GOMS to analyze for speed, as well as user testing). It will also include pointers to other good work in the area (Don Norman's _Design of Everyday Things_ and his principles of design).

The GNOME Human Interface Guidelines are the first free documentation to address what makes a good interface, but a lot of the guidelines are GNOME-specific, or specific to particular GUI elements. It would be great if this documentation could be generalized to more 

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3/30/04

GNOME HIG (http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/)
Apple HIG (http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/OSXHIGuidelines/index.html)
MS Guidelines for UI Developers and Designers (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnwue/html/welcome.asp)
IBM SAA Common User Interface (http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr_OS390/Shelves/CEESL002)

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4/5/04

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6/14/04

My name is Ethan Glasser-Camp, and I'm a Computer Science and Psychology undergraduate at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. I would like to write a HOWTO about HCI (human-computer interaction), specifically HID (human interface design). Interface design has traditionally been a weak point of Linux programmers. This proposed document would cover two techniques to analyze interfaces -- GOMS (specifically KLM-GOMS), for analyzing the speed with which an expert user uses an interface, and the cognitive walkthrough, used to assess the learnability of an interface. It will also cover a list of resources for people who are trying to learn heuristics for HID.

There exist many good pages on HID already. Among these are:

GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/)
Apple HIG (http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/OSXHIGuidelines/index.html)
MS Guidelines for UI Developers and Designers (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnwue/html/welcome.asp)
IBM SAA Common User Interface (http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr_OS390/Shelves/CEESL002)


While all of these are good resources for reading, especially for the
use of someone who is designing for one of those environments,
readings for the cognitive walkthrough and KLM-GOMS are less
plentiful. A goal of this document is to give an example of both
techniques, and also to locate these documents in a place Linux
programmers will see it. Another goal is to explain these techniques
with the psychology/human factors background necessary to understand
them.

Documents concerning the cognitive walkthrough can be found here:

http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~zwz22/CognWalk.htm
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/computing/classes/cs3302/documents/cog.walk.html
http://www.acm.org/sigchi/chi95/proceedings/tutors/jr_bdy.htm

A document concerning KLM-GOMS can be found here:

http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/cs6751_97_fall/projects/closet2000+/FinalEssays/goms.html

Do you think the LDP would have use for such a document?