Summary:
Many winners employ dashboards to give users a single overview of complex information and use lightboxes to ensure that users notice dialogs. Also, the Office 2007 ribbon showed surprisingly strong early adoption.
Business-Oriented Interaction
A "dashboard" design pattern: [users] need alerts, and must avoid issuing too many alerts because doing so could cause users to overlook the most-important emergencies. [users] need drilldowns. Finally, [apps] display selected forms of current status in a single overview, which lets users see the health of their ads or servers in a glance.
The general challenges are managing large amounts of information and giving users a single view of complexity.
Freeform vs. Linear Task Flow
A primary challenge in simplifying the initial experience for less-expert users is that you might create something that's too restrained for your traditional users. Many of our winners addressed this dilemma by emphasizing a linear task flow for the newbies, while also offering a more traditional open-ended set of commands for the experts.
Wizards abound this year as the preferred approach for guiding users through the application. But these wizards are more flexible and less dumbed-down than the restrictive wizards we've seen in the past. ...
Office 2007 Ribbon Sees Fast Uptake
... Considering how revolutionary it is to abandon traditional pull-down menus, having additional applications implement this idea only a year after it was introduced is very fast indeed.
For decades, we've heard enterprise users say, "just give me a UI that looks like Office." ...
...it seems that the ribbon has legs and transfers beyond its document-editing origins.
Modal Dialog Boxes: Yes or No?
... So, what's the answer here? There is none. Generally, a user experience feels more accommodating if modal dialog boxes are avoided or downplayed. But, when something does need fixing, it's better to make sure that the user knows about it.
Lightbox: Interaction Design Technique of the Year
In UI terms, a lightbox draws the user's attention to a dialog box, error message, or other design element in the middle of the screen by dimming the rest of the screen. ...
The lightbox benefit is obvious: it's impossible for users to overlook the only bright part of the screen. This is in stark contrast to many traditional designs, where users often remain blissfully ignorant of notifications that are camouflaged within busy pages.
Lightboxes do have downsides, however, and they shouldn't be used everywhere.
- A lightbox is a blunt instrument that hits users over the head and causes them to stop everything they're doing. Don't use them for low-priority items or background information.
- Talk about modal dialog boxes. A lightbox takes that concept to the extreme. ...
- Users often have to refer to information on the background display to resolve the situation in the foreground dialog box. If the background is dimmed too much, such information can be hard to read.
Double Usability Challenge
Several winners were construction kits that let users create something for a different set of end users... Such apps face a double usability challenge. First, the user interface must be easy enough for the direct users to create their desired outcomes. But second, these outcomes must be easy for the ultimate users to use. This second issue is particularly difficult because the ultimate users don't use the application; instead they use the direct user's creation.
The solution in all cases was the same: Make it particularly easy for direct users to create highly usable designs. ...
User Assistance
User assistance ran the gamut from applications with no help or manuals, to fully described applications with extensive online help, knowledge bases, and other elaborate forms of user assistance.
Mostly, the trend is to downplay user assistance as a separate feature. Most applications integrate helpful hints and descriptions with the main user interface, using on-screen instructions, beefed-up super-tooltips, and click-tips. ...
Emotional Design
... bold graphics and humorous assistance text.
Usability Methods: Cheap but Contextual
The winning designs are revolutionary, but there's nothing revolutionary about the usability methods employed to ensure their quality. The teams used well-known and long-established usability methods:
- Most winners used a very rapid approach to usability, emphasizing small-N user testing and paper prototypes to generate user feedback before investing in coding. ...
- Many winners conducted field studies or other forms of contextual research in the workplace. ...
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