Book content

Software Usability and Web Design is a design guide for user interface and web site.

The book provides rules and ergonomic principles to take into account at each stage of the user interface design, either for software of web site

Software Usability and Web Design is organised in three main parts. The first one provides recommendations for designing the user interface of a software application. The second part addresses the web design. The last one presents tools and methods for user-oriented development.

Software Usability

The first three chapters concern man-machine interface design for software:

• Screen deals with information display, interface layout, text and messages.
• Man-Machine Dialogue explains how to organize the interface components in order to improve the ease of use of the software, particularly the window design and the choice of dialogue modes.
• Errors and Online Help presents recommendations for dealing with user errors and designing an online help.

Web Design

The three other chapters are related to web sites design:

• Defining and Targeting the Site explains how to define the content of the site according to the user perspective.
• Web Navigation presents the recommandations to be taken into account when designing the navigation protocol of a site.
• Web Page deals with the specific graphical aspects of the web.

Design methodology

The last chapter Usability Engineering described methods to integrate usability engineering in software development, particularly user testing and prototyping.

The appendix presents the major works in cognitive psychology which have provided the basis of Software Ergonomics. A design checklist is provided at the end of the book. It allows to check whether the usability criteria are taken into account during the design of a web site.

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