Note Amy that some of this is getting interpreted as Markdown, the formatting isn't intentionally added by me -Greg
greg:
baudish link is broken in the text
where did the examples come from? how did you select them? ones you remembered from classes?
The chapter on interactive interfaces is very interesting and thorough when it comes to describing WIMP interfaces, and all the research that has gone into creating these highly artificial interactive systems. However, even though the chapter does outline the three factors that describe direct manipulation, it does not discuss anything related to non-WIMP interfaces. Considering that was a point of the class discussion and video games do tend to use elements of WIMP while greatly altering how we interact with information, it would have been nice to include some general points and examples about non-WIMP interactive systems.
Reading Critique:
Various spelling treatments of "checkbox/check box," consider sticking to one treatment throughout the chapter or addressing the two variations.
"...there were no notions of scroll bars, icons, or checkboxes."
"What about sliders, check boxes, text boxes, radio buttons..."
"Checkboxes provide an error-free mechanism for specifying binary values..."
Addressing Pointers in the chapter; The chapter is organized with the expectation of being walked through the meaning of WIMP. It starts off by sequentially going in depth on Windows, Icons, and Menus, but when the reader expects to learn what pointers are, the chapter instead highlights widgets, and copy & paste. The note on revisiting pointers in another chapter is easily overlooked because pointer is the only word in the acronym WIMP that does not get bolded in its paragraph. It then becomes unclear in the chapter if Pointers means Direct Manipulation or if this is a new concept. Adding emphasis to pointer through bolding or stating it differently (instead of pointing) would be more effective for explaining that the topic will be taught later on.
The wording for three ideas of Direct Manipulation are difficult to understand the way that they are being defined in the chapter. Especially "Feedback on the effect of an operation is immediately visible and is reversible." If an image, animation, or example could be included here, it would help relate the concept to actions that people perform regularly on their computers/mobile devices. I skipped the reading quiz question this week because I could only understand the first 2 parts of direct manipulation, but when I was trying to recall and explain it in my own words for the quiz, I could not relate it to anything.
It's should be Its in
"It's interface, shown above"
I think it would be more helpful to include more image examples when describing more novel types of elements like: "hierarchical marking menus that are radial, can be moved through without clicking, and can result in a memory for pointing trajectories for rapid selection of items". It's hard to picture what that interaction looks like.
its should be it's
"WIMP isn't natural, its invented"
Reading Critique
Abridged videos. Is it possible to edit down the videos to show the most important aspects? Sometimes I'm unsure if I'm expected to watch the whole thing.
Areas for further exploration/provide details to satisfy reader curiosity without distracting from the main ideas:
Direct Manipulation. How has this concept evolved over time? Have people debated it?
WIMP. Are there alternatives? I think I would want the author to have a position on this model. A lot of concepts so far are somewhat presented "as is," which is good for an instructor lead a discussion around, but might be unsatisfying to a reader outside this class.
From the reading, I felt like it did a good job of pointing out interface conventions that we are all familiar with.
Something I would of like to see more of was an example of direct manipulation interfaces.
As technology and interface designs evolve we are seeing more examples of this in our daily lives.
Another section I would have liked to see more of is experimental/future interface interactions. AR devices like holo lens create an opportunity for brand new interactions to occur. Some of these conventions are starting to become established and better understand what is being done currently and where things are going has great merit.
I enjoyed this chapter and how it gives a historical context for the UI elements we now take for granted. I have a few subjective grammatical suggestions, which are located in the square brackets:
Researchers in the [1980s] were behind many of these innovations …
For example, imagine a menu item labeled "Sign in..." that signs the user into a service[.] How can users provide that input?
… such as form validation and user efficiency features such as auto-complete[.]
… and to manipulate speech[,] music[,] and other audio more directly (Rubin et al. 2013[]).
It also seems that the citations swap between APA and ACM formatting.
As far as content, I see the chapter mentions that pointers will be covered later in the textbook, but I would have enjoyed just a snippet of information about pointers. This would help me build a more cohesive understanding of WIMP interface elements by comparing, contrasting, and visualizing the descriptions of all four elements. Even just a quick description that relates pointers to cursors would prevent me from leaving the chapter to learn more.
Critique of chapter
"It's interface, shown above, contained all of the elements you're familiar with today."
Suggest changing this to the possessive its'
"Responsive web design shares similar ideas to these content aware techniques, in that it aims to automatically lay out content on a screen to fit the physical dimensions of different screen sizes"
Suggest changing to "content-aware" and "layout"
Windows, macOS, and Ubuntu have many advanced window management features, allowing the user to see a zoomed out view with all active windows and move them to different virtual desktops.
Suggest changing to "zoomed-out"
Second paragraph: some people reading this may not have ever used VR. Perhaps you could include a screenshot or image of what menus/icons look like within VR?
One question I had while reading this chapter concerned Icons. I understand the reasoning for them, especially now when we’re so accustomed to seeing and using them, but at the time of creation, why were icons created instead of just using the names of programs and documents in a menu? For example, the desktop could just have a list of program names. Was there a step between CLIs and GUIs that didn’t use icons? Perhaps you could explain the reasoning for this.
Recommendations for the chapter:
Typo in the second Paragraph (from the very beginning):
It's -> Its interface, shown above, contained all of the elements you're familiar with today. These elements are typically referred to with the acronym WIMP, which stands for Windows, Icons, Menus, and Pointer.
Having that videos in previous chapters were short and we could watch them all, maybe, for the video this chapter it would be nice to indicate which parts of this video are the most important to watch?
I am not sure if it matters, but these signs "" are not the quotation marks, these are indications of minutes in typography. Usually, quotation marks look like this “”.
After reading Chapter 5: Interactive Interfaces, I noticed there was a lot of new information and terminology. I’m making an assumption that your book will be read by people who range in their level of knowledge around anatomy of user interfaces. That said, to improve this chapter, I think it might be helpful for people who may not be well versed in the right terminology for elements in a user interface to have some images to illustrate what you mean by some of these terms. For example, when you begin talking about menus, dialogs, forms, etc., it would be a helpful visual aid to see what you mean by this. In addition to this, I think that the “its” in the header “WIMP isn’t natural, its invented” should be spelled “it’s”? Finally, while reading this chapter and hearing about how different organizations had varying ideas of how to design early interfaces, I really wanted to learn more about how they came up with these ideas. For example, in the section where you talk about window managers, would it be possible to include information about how they got to the current paradigm today? I feel like as a designer this would be super interesting to know any techniques they used to arrive at that idea. I’m not sure if that information can be researched but it’s just a thought!
Note Amy that some of this is getting interpreted as Markdown, the formatting isn't intentionally added by me -Greg
greg: baudish link is broken in the text where did the examples come from? how did you select them? ones you remembered from classes?
The chapter on interactive interfaces is very interesting and thorough when it comes to describing WIMP interfaces, and all the research that has gone into creating these highly artificial interactive systems. However, even though the chapter does outline the three factors that describe direct manipulation, it does not discuss anything related to non-WIMP interfaces. Considering that was a point of the class discussion and video games do tend to use elements of WIMP while greatly altering how we interact with information, it would have been nice to include some general points and examples about non-WIMP interactive systems.
Reading Critique:
Various spelling treatments of "checkbox/check box," consider sticking to one treatment throughout the chapter or addressing the two variations. "...there were no notions of scroll bars, icons, or checkboxes." "What about sliders, check boxes, text boxes, radio buttons..." "Checkboxes provide an error-free mechanism for specifying binary values..."
Addressing Pointers in the chapter; The chapter is organized with the expectation of being walked through the meaning of WIMP. It starts off by sequentially going in depth on Windows, Icons, and Menus, but when the reader expects to learn what pointers are, the chapter instead highlights widgets, and copy & paste. The note on revisiting pointers in another chapter is easily overlooked because pointer is the only word in the acronym WIMP that does not get bolded in its paragraph. It then becomes unclear in the chapter if Pointers means Direct Manipulation or if this is a new concept. Adding emphasis to pointer through bolding or stating it differently (instead of pointing) would be more effective for explaining that the topic will be taught later on.
The wording for three ideas of Direct Manipulation are difficult to understand the way that they are being defined in the chapter. Especially "Feedback on the effect of an operation is immediately visible and is reversible." If an image, animation, or example could be included here, it would help relate the concept to actions that people perform regularly on their computers/mobile devices. I skipped the reading quiz question this week because I could only understand the first 2 parts of direct manipulation, but when I was trying to recall and explain it in my own words for the quiz, I could not relate it to anything.
It's should be Its in "It's interface, shown above"
I think it would be more helpful to include more image examples when describing more novel types of elements like: "hierarchical marking menus that are radial, can be moved through without clicking, and can result in a memory for pointing trajectories for rapid selection of items". It's hard to picture what that interaction looks like.
its should be it's
"WIMP isn't natural, its invented"
Reading Critique
Abridged videos. Is it possible to edit down the videos to show the most important aspects? Sometimes I'm unsure if I'm expected to watch the whole thing.
Areas for further exploration/provide details to satisfy reader curiosity without distracting from the main ideas:
Direct Manipulation. How has this concept evolved over time? Have people debated it? WIMP. Are there alternatives? I think I would want the author to have a position on this model. A lot of concepts so far are somewhat presented "as is," which is good for an instructor lead a discussion around, but might be unsatisfying to a reader outside this class.
From the reading, I felt like it did a good job of pointing out interface conventions that we are all familiar with. Something I would of like to see more of was an example of direct manipulation interfaces. As technology and interface designs evolve we are seeing more examples of this in our daily lives.
Another section I would have liked to see more of is experimental/future interface interactions. AR devices like holo lens create an opportunity for brand new interactions to occur. Some of these conventions are starting to become established and better understand what is being done currently and where things are going has great merit.
I enjoyed this chapter and how it gives a historical context for the UI elements we now take for granted. I have a few subjective grammatical suggestions, which are located in the square brackets:
Researchers in the [1980s] were behind many of these innovations … For example, imagine a menu item labeled "Sign in..." that signs the user into a service[.] How can users provide that input? … such as form validation and user efficiency features such as auto-complete[.] … and to manipulate speech[,] music[,] and other audio more directly (Rubin et al. 2013[]). It also seems that the citations swap between APA and ACM formatting.
As far as content, I see the chapter mentions that pointers will be covered later in the textbook, but I would have enjoyed just a snippet of information about pointers. This would help me build a more cohesive understanding of WIMP interface elements by comparing, contrasting, and visualizing the descriptions of all four elements. Even just a quick description that relates pointers to cursors would prevent me from leaving the chapter to learn more.
Critique of chapter
"It's interface, shown above, contained all of the elements you're familiar with today." Suggest changing this to the possessive its' "Responsive web design shares similar ideas to these content aware techniques, in that it aims to automatically lay out content on a screen to fit the physical dimensions of different screen sizes" Suggest changing to "content-aware" and "layout" Windows, macOS, and Ubuntu have many advanced window management features, allowing the user to see a zoomed out view with all active windows and move them to different virtual desktops. Suggest changing to "zoomed-out"
Second paragraph: some people reading this may not have ever used VR. Perhaps you could include a screenshot or image of what menus/icons look like within VR?
One question I had while reading this chapter concerned Icons. I understand the reasoning for them, especially now when we’re so accustomed to seeing and using them, but at the time of creation, why were icons created instead of just using the names of programs and documents in a menu? For example, the desktop could just have a list of program names. Was there a step between CLIs and GUIs that didn’t use icons? Perhaps you could explain the reasoning for this.
Recommendations for the chapter:
Typo in the second Paragraph (from the very beginning): It's -> Its interface, shown above, contained all of the elements you're familiar with today. These elements are typically referred to with the acronym WIMP, which stands for Windows, Icons, Menus, and Pointer.
Having that videos in previous chapters were short and we could watch them all, maybe, for the video this chapter it would be nice to indicate which parts of this video are the most important to watch?
I am not sure if it matters, but these signs "" are not the quotation marks, these are indications of minutes in typography. Usually, quotation marks look like this “”.
After reading Chapter 5: Interactive Interfaces, I noticed there was a lot of new information and terminology. I’m making an assumption that your book will be read by people who range in their level of knowledge around anatomy of user interfaces. That said, to improve this chapter, I think it might be helpful for people who may not be well versed in the right terminology for elements in a user interface to have some images to illustrate what you mean by some of these terms. For example, when you begin talking about menus, dialogs, forms, etc., it would be a helpful visual aid to see what you mean by this. In addition to this, I think that the “its” in the header “WIMP isn’t natural, its invented” should be spelled “it’s”? Finally, while reading this chapter and hearing about how different organizations had varying ideas of how to design early interfaces, I really wanted to learn more about how they came up with these ideas. For example, in the section where you talk about window managers, would it be possible to include information about how they got to the current paradigm today? I feel like as a designer this would be super interesting to know any techniques they used to arrive at that idea. I’m not sure if that information can be researched but it’s just a thought!