What if Google Had to Design for Google?

A humourous take on what would happen if Google had to design their website so that their own Search Engine would rank it right up there…

A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods

Visual Literacy has something here that I simply do not have the words to describe. See it for yourself and be amazed!

Looks Good Works Well

Bill Scott, Director UI Engineering, Netflix, puts down his musings on rich web design and user interface engineering at Looks Good Works Well.

Adaptive Path

SF-based Adaptive Path does some really interesting work on user experiences. They also maintain an interesting blog.

CHI-SI

Chennai-headquartered CHI-SI is a chapter of Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) special interest group on Computer-Human Interaction, SIGCHI. CHI-SI hosts a national conference every year.

GUI, HCI, HFE, MMI

Interfaces, interfaces, interfaces. That’s what this section is all about. You may have access to the most powerful computer on Earth, but it is of little use if it doesn’t provide you an interface that lets you tell it what exactly you want it to do. In everyday life, we interact with many, many machines through user interfaces - including alarm clocks, cars and microwave ovens.

User interfaces are more of a psychology problem than a computer science problem.

I believe that user interfaces have an immense potential in the way we write computer programs. I’m talking about programs writing programs. We’ve come a long way since writing arcane commands on interpreter prompts but the more user-friendly programming interfaces become, the more people can translate their ideas into actions.

Finally, most computer interfaces today are 2-dimensional. In all probability, this is merely hereditary. Thinking “out of the box” requires a box, and boxes are 3-dimensional.

The following fields are closely interrelated:

• GUI (Graphical User Interface)
• HCI (Human-Computer Interaction, also referred to as CHI)
• HFE (Human Factors Engineering)
• MMI (Man-Machine Interface)

References:

• Handbook for Human Computer Interaction (2nd Edition), By Andrew Sears and Julie A. Jacko (CRC Press, 2007)