perlman@wanginst.EDU (Gary Perlman) (06/30/87)
"Guidelines for Designing User Interface Software"
ESD-TR-86-278 August 1986
Sidney L. Smith & Jane N. Mosier
The MITRE Corporation
Burlington Road
Bedford, MA 01730
The Guidelines report is the single most comprehensive source of
information for designers of user interface software. The report is
divided into six sections:
SECTION # Guidelines
1 Data Entry 199
2 Data Display 298
3 Sequence Control 184
4 User Guidance 110
5 Data Transmission 83
6 Data Protection 70
The report has a 10 page introduction, and each section has
a general introduction. Within sections, guidelines are divided into
functional areas containing individual guidelines.
Guidelines look something like this:
USER GUIDANCE 4.0 General
4.0/21 + Active Voice
Adopt active rather than passive voice in user guidance messages.
Example
(Good) | Clear the screen by pressing RESET. |
(Bad) | The screen is cleared by pressing RESET. |
Comment
Sentences in active voice are easier to understand.
Reference
BB 3.8.5 (this is an abbreviated reference to a highly cited source)
See also
2.1/17 (this is the number of a related guideline)
Guidelines always have titles and a single sentence statement of the
guideline (and, as you might expect, always in the active voice).
Guidelines have optional comments, examples, exceptions, references,
and cross-references. For the 944 guidelines, there are 283 references
and over 500 cross-references.
The information in the guidelines is usually useful, and not very
controversial. Some people might say that they are all obvious,
but I think that the guidelines serve as useful reminders for even
experienced designers. For most software engineers, I think they
offer the right level of information. My recommendation is that if
a designer is going to have just one source of information, there is
none better than this report. You can write to the authors for a
copy of the report, but they may have run out of the 1300 they had
printed. The Human Factors Society (in Santa Monica, CA) should be
publishing an enhanced version of the report in the next year.
One problem I face with this almost-500-page report is that it is
hard to find relevant guidelines, even though there are tables of
contents of varying levels of detail and a topic index. It is
tedious to follow cross-references, and a bother to try to find
information distributed across different sections. In early 1987
I was fortunate to receive the online source files to the report,
and since then, I have been prototyping a hypertext interface to it.
I will describe that in more detail in a later message, but if you
are in the Boston area and would like to be a friendly user site,
I would be happy to give free instruction and use of the system.
It runs on UNIX machines under curses (e.g., VAX, SUN), and I hope
to have it running on an IBM PC soon. I would also welcome your
suggestions about how I could make a lineprinter file, or perhaps
an nroff file available to the net (about 750 Kbytes).
--
Gary Perlman Wang Institute Tyngsboro, MA 01879 (617) 649-9731
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