The old book GUI Design for Dummies by Laura Arlov (I don' thave it in front of me, so I might be off on Author/Title a bit) had an excellent section on "GUI architectures" that discussed the GUI architectures of the 1990s like MDI, SDI, task panel, hierarchy, wizard, CRUD, button panel, hub and spoke design etc. That book was not for dummies, it had a good section on GUI architectures and tied them to task and frequency of use which are two key variables. Now we have Web User Interface architectures (WUIs).
The Yale Style Guide from earlier Web days had a discussion of various Web Architectures and it put them on a scale of difficulty versus power. There are hybrid architectures that you get from combining some of the basic architectures. Someof the architectures are amenable to a single type of object while others can support multiple objects. I've talked on this before and created a matrix of UI architectures against key criteria. Some of the Microsoft GUI Style guides have discussed this (When to use a Tabbed architecture versus a panel architecture). Another factor that comes up in discussion about high-level structures is the underlying metaphor - for example, tabs imply random access so if you have a tab structure, then putting required fields on a tab could be a problem. This is a topic that doesn't get much serious discussion. I'm going a workshop for BostonCHI and will be including this as one topic. HFI used to have a module in the GUI training that reviewed various high-level UI structures and the conditions where you would use them (I taught the course many years ago so I'm not sure if they still do), but it was actually a popular part of the course since it looked at the high-level first before getting into all the details of widget design. the point was that if you picked the wrong UI architecture for a tasks (e.g., a wizard for a tasks that is done many times a day) then the rest of your design could be very good, but the product would still fail because of fundamental flaws. Good topic. Chauncey On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 6:02 PM, Donna Spencer <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi guys > > I'm writing some workshop material on high-level structures for interfaces > - explaining different high-level patterns that an interface may use (e.g. > linear, two/three panels, canvas plus tools, dashboards etc) > > I always like to provide additional reading, but can't find any good > references for this material, except for the Tidwell book. Most pattern > libraries focus on much more granular combinations of components, not the > high-level structure. > > Any ideas for articles or references? Otherwise I'm just gonna have to > write something up myself ;) > > Donna > > -- > Donna Spencer - Maadmob > [email protected] > 02 6255 4993 / 0409778693 > http://maadmob.com.au/ > http://www.rosenfeldmedia.com/books/cardsorting/ > > ________________________________________________________________ > Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! > To post to this list ....... [email protected] > Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe > List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines > List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help > ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
