Usability First » Software Engineering

IDE

jls — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 22:52:58 +0000

integrated development environment; a software development tool that integrates a wide variety of tools, such as syntax-directed editors, debuggers, and screen layout tools.

HTML

jls — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 21:36:00 +0000

HypertText Markup Language; a simple notation for describing the format and content of text by adding simple annotations or “tags” to the text. HTML is the fundamental format used for presenting documents on the web.

horizontal and vertical prototypes

jls — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 21:16:06 +0000

describes what types of capabilities are implemented in a prototype: horizontal prototypes display a wide range of features but without fully implementing all of those features; vertical prototypes do not attempt to show all that will be in a system but instead focus on implementing a small set of features in a nearly-complete fashion.

Horizontal prototypes are appropriate for understanding relationships across a broad system and for showing the range of abilities of a system.

Vertical prototypes are most appropriate when a certain complex feature of a system is poorly-understood and needs to be explored, e.g. as a proof-of-concept.

high-fidelity prototype

jls — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 20:58:04 +0000

a prototype that is quite close to the final product, with lots of detail and functionality. From a user testing point of view, a high-fidelity prototype is close enough to a final product to be able to examine usability questions in detail and make strong conclusions about how behavior will relate to use of the final product.

hacker ethic

jls — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 18:21:37 +0000

the value system espoused by an ill-defined collection of hackers, programmers and other technologists who love working with computers. The primary value is that all information should be free, and this has been reflected in shareware and open source code movements such as the Linux platform. These principles generally oppose software copy-protection, oppose all forms of censorship, oppose burdensome software licensing agreements, and generally oppose all forms of commercialization that lead to restricted access to information.

group-enabling technologies

jls — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 18:25:22 +0000

systems that add group support to single-user applications, by providing, for instance, telepointers, overlays for collaborative annotations, shared windows, chat facilities, and methods for finding and connecting to other users.

greeking

jls — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 18:04:23 +0000

in prototypes, the representation of text as incomprehensible words, greek or latin filler words, X’s, lines, or scribbles. Also called mumble text. The idea is to give a feel for how the page will look and be organized without needing to have the final text.

iterative design

admin — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 22:56:30 +0000

the idea that design should be done in repeated cycles where, in each cycle, the design is elaborated, refined, and tested, and the results of testing at each cycle feed into the design focus of the next cycle.

This is identical in spirit to the notion of developing a software product through a series of continually-refined prototypes, and the idea of developing generations of a software product through an iterative development cycle (such as the Spiral model of development).

Java

admin — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 22:54:24 +0000

a cross-platform object-oriented general-purpose programming language. Java can be embedded within a web page to provide a very flexible user interface. Java is not to be confused with JavaScript, an essentially unrelated scripting language that can be used within a web page, but provides extremely limited capabilities, especially with regard to input and output.

frankensteining

jls — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 22:35:56 +0000

the merger of multiple designs into one despite the fact that they don’t form a coherent, consistent whole. A typical situation is to present multiple design options to a client who asks for a piecemeal combination of features. While the original designs each conveyed a unified message, the combination is a monstrous hodge-podge.

layout manager

admin — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 22:24:24 +0000

a program that automatically determines the layout of graphics and user interface elements based on relationships and restrictions specified by the designer/programmer. A layout manager is particularly useful for handling layouts when a programmer cannot be certain of what graphic elements will be present or what their dimensions will be, and helps when a different font is used or the text is translated, thus changing the size of text elements in a layout.

forward compatibility

jls — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 22:23:25 +0000

designing software to work with future versions of itself, e.g. by anticipating the needs of future versions and how they will impact data formats and network protocols. For instance, in web development, writing HTML so that it will work in future browsers, which requires anticipating how HTML will evolve.

learn mode

admin — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 22:22:39 +0000

a state in which the computer is “learning” by observing the user’s behavior. The term is often used to refer to the period when a macro is being defined by having each action the user performs added to the macro, also called “record mode”.

In more powerful programming-by-demonstration systems, the user’s actions can be generalized to more complicated scripts involving loops and conditionals. The hard part in doing this is determining which user actions must be performed exactly, and which are merely meant to be instances of more general concepts: a parameter to the procedure or a conditional action that depends on the current computer state.

forms-based programming

jls — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 22:16:41 +0000

programming by filling out a set of forms that query a user about the types of inputs and results they want. Forms-based approaches are useful in specialized domains which do not require the full power and generalization of a traditional programming language.

Forms-based programming is one type of end-user programming, allowing users to create reasonably complex programs without having studied programming.

low-fidelity prototype

admin — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 21:37:41 +0000

a prototype that is sketchy and incomplete, that has some characteristics of the target product but is otherwise simple, usually in order to quickly produce the prototype and test broad concepts.

mockup

admin — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 18:59:10 +0000

another term for prototypes, usually referring to low-fidelity prototypes, such as paper illustrations, screenshots, or simple configurations of screens with limited interaction.

model-view-controller

admin — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 18:54:39 +0000

(MVC) an architecture for software that separates the underlying application (model) from the user interface display (view) and input (controller).

MVC is generally implemented with callbacks – the underlying application registers with user interface widgets (in the view and controller) and gets called back by them when something changes in the interface that it must respond to. Complete separation of the model, view, and controller is not in principle entirely possible, since all of them must still contain code to communicate changes to each other. Similar in spirit to a later architecture known as abstraction-link-view (ALV).

flowchart

jls — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 18:21:06 +0000

a visual way of representing a task or procedure, traditionally used by programmers to visualize the flow within their programs. Steps of a process are represented in boxes and flow is represented by arrows connecting the boxes. Input and output are typically represented in skewed parallelograms, and decision points are usually represented with diamonds. Flowcharts generally do not scale well to extremely large processes, and they mostly fell out of use as a programming tool with the advent of structured programming techniques, which minimized the use of complicated branching structures in software.

mythical man-month

admin — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 17:59:00 +0000

a man-month is a way of measuring work output for production which is reasonably helpful in certain limited areas of industries like manufacturing. The basic idea is that if you want to produce twice as many sprockets, then you can hire twice as many people to get it done. Worker productivity is measured by how much one person can do in one month. Thus, what takes 1 person 100 months to perform should take 100 people 1 month to perform.

This perspective is called “mythical” because it doesn’t apply in many organizational settings, and in particular in software development environments. Doubling the people on a software development project may not merely fail to double the speed of development, it may actually slow a project down.

object-oriented programming

admin — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 17:06:55 +0000

(OOP) a programming technique and a characteristic of programming languages often associated with graphical user interfaces. Object-oriented programming treats data items as “objects” belonging to a category of related objects with similar functionality called a “class”. Classes are organized in a hierarchy such that classes inherit properties and functionality from their parents in the hierarchy.

extreme programming

jls — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 00:21:00 +0000

an approach to managing programming projects to maximize the quality output of programming teams and optimize shared knowledge and training. The technique relies on pairs of programmers sharing a single computer and collaboratively solving problems. Programming tasks are kept to under 2 weeks to effectively track progress and maximize the likelihood of success.

paper-and-pencil prototype

admin — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 00:14:55 +0000

a paper sketch of a user interface with enough detail to make design decisions and usability evaluations, whether through a usability inspection, a focus group, or a simple user test.

event handler

jls — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 23:52:34 +0000

a central software routine for applications in graphical user interfaces that processes events as they arrive, primarily user input such as keystrokes and mouse clicks, but also system events such as time-based triggers. The events arrive in an event buffer. The events are processed in a cycle called the “event loop” where the oldest event in the buffer is interpreted and quickly processed, then the event handler is revisited for the next event.

pluggable look and feel architecture

admin — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 23:29:54 +0000

an application or system architecture that allows applications to run with a different look and feel than that originally envisioned by the application’s designers. Any other interface specification can be substituted for the same application. While allowing general-purpose substitution of the entire interface is basically an impossibly-difficult problem, some level is possible, whether it’s just switching color and font themes, or allowing alternate interfaces for people with disabilities, such as screen readers.

programming by demonstration

admin — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 23:02:18 +0000

systems that allow a person to construct a program simply by demonstrating the actions that the program needs to perform. The system then must infer what loops and conditionals might be involved, and may allow the user to select among several candidate programs that attempt to generalize the users demonstrated task into a program. This works well for very simple tasks and may even work quite well in specialized domains where meaningful inferences can easily be made, but programming by demonstration certainly will not be replacing traditional programming for large-scale programs.