Our team has been been given the task of redesigning a set of kiosk interfaces. We have the opportunity to rearrange the navigation controls, but we have no feedback from users regarding the current layout and no budget to do usability studies or user interviews.
I'd like to do a survey of literature to guide best placement of the navigation controls, and I'll need data in order to continue the project of teaching our designers and clients that "it looks good" is not a sufficient strategy in UI layout. A few of the kiosks are inclined touchscreens placed at about waist height on a standing adult -- the user audience can range in age from 12 to 90 years. (Don't even get me started on the problem of accommodating blind or wheelchair-bound visitors. Luckily, there are live sales attendants on hand.) The screens are about tabloid-sized (A3 for those of you using a real measurement system), in landscape orientation. The same UI layout is used on a similar set of standard non-touch monitors, with mouse- controlled pointers. We'd like to use the same UI on both sets of kiosks. Currently, the navigational controls are arrayed in two groups - a vertical bar on the left and a strip of buttons at the bottom. It's unlikely that any one visitor would use the touch-screens for more than 10 minutes at a time, and no text input is required for the touch-screens. The primary content is displayed in a large rectangle above and right of the navigation controls, and we can't divide or obscure the content without a much bigger re-design than we're currently contemplating. My current thinking is that we need to push all the nav controls (between 6 and 9 buttons) into one relatively compact group (probably the left column) to avoid requiring the user to simultaneously hold the arm aloft and track left-right while acquiring the target. Any other advice you can give would, as always, be most welcome. -Will Will Parker [EMAIL PROTECTED] ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] List Guidelines ............ http://beta.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://beta.ixda.org/help Unsubscribe ................ http://beta.ixda.org/unsubscribe Questions .................. [EMAIL PROTECTED] Home ....................... http://beta.ixda.org
