I write specs for music applications. I try to keep the pictures
pretty sketchy, unless when pixel-perfection is required.
We have a basic anatomy of the specs, which looks like this:
Title page
Executive Summary - the elevator pitch of the feature
Goals and Non-goals - what user goals we try t
Your UI is interesting since it alternates information about the
current location and what the user hovers above with the mouse.
If you had one list/item for "where am I?" and one list for "what
am I hovering?", you could add the "Show in Finder" as a button or
list item to the former.
This seems
In line with Christine slightly off topic reply, the usability
perspective on musical instruments is really interesting. Check out
Andy Hunt's research. His testing (as far as I can remember) shows
that for musical applications, complex interfaces with divergent
mapping of user input is preferable
One feature that some MIDI keyboards have is aftertouch, i.e. that
while the note is pressed it sends a control message (0-127)
proportional to the pressure with which the key is pressed. This can
then be used to control volume, filter or any other parameter of the
synthesized sound. While monophon
I was personally a bit confused when i installed Firefox 3 and used
the Find feature for the first time. The widget order is:
Find: (? search string) [Next] [Previous]
This broke my mental model of the direction in the document.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
If you have a laptop I would recommend using almost any cheap electret
microphone in combination with a freeware audio recorder like Audacity
(all platforms) or Audio Recorder 3.2 (OSX).
If a laptop is too bulky you could use a Zoom H2 digital recorder. It
can record uncompressed wav files or dire
I've noticed it in friends of mine who use these platforms, and even
in me as well!! I'm a quite recent Mac user (been using Windows for
ages) and I'm strangely finding it logical to put stuff there. Never
did on Windows though, I always had to create "work", photos,
downloads, directories (or even
Jakob Nielsen has some guidelines regarding number of users for
usability test, and I guess they apply to field studies as well.
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/2319.html
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/quantitative_testing.html
Personally, I think the statistical significance is rather
unimporta
Jeff, I think all of the reasons you mentioned applies. Speech
recognition and synthesis in my opinion adds very little in the
keyboard/mouse/screen paradigm we are currently in.
Studying this also reveals how much information there is in the way
we say things, human to human, which is very tricky
