CS 257: Software Design

Usability examples

You may work alone or with one partner for this assignment.

This assignment is intended to get you to read about some important ideas in usability and interaction design, and to tie those ideas explicitly to software that you actually use. Having concrete examples of the concepts will help you retain those concepts and more readily apply them in the future.

Step 1: Read

Read these excerpts from About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design, by Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, and David Cronin. This link is restricted to Carleton IP addresses. Please don't share this file beyond this class.

Step 2: Find Examples

For each of the following interaction design terms, provide one example of a piece of software that does well, and another of a piece of similar-type software that does poorly. Include screenshots, and state in a couple sentences specifically how the successful UI is different from the unsuccessful UI. By "similar-type," I mean programs that perform identical or similar functions. So you might compare two different text editors, or two different versions of Spider Solitaire, or two different web shopping carts, but you wouldn't compare a shopping cart with Spider.

  1. Excise (good=minimal excise, bad=lots of excise)
  2. Mental models (good=the UI matches a typical user's mental model, bad=it doesn't)
  3. Posture (good=the UI is appropriate for the application's natural posture, bad=it's not)
  4. Expertise level (good=the UI matches its intended audience's level of expertise; bad=it doesn't)
  5. Discoverability (good=the UI makes its features discoverable; bad=it doesn't)

Handing it in

Submit a PDF via Moodle.