Developing visual representations of information and controls is a wildly creative process. In particular this means when executed my two independent people at the same time, or even by a single person at two different points in time, the output is probably never the same. At first this property may seem problematic, but on a second thought you can exploit it as part of a bigger process: Develop a set of alternatives (which come naturally) and let people choose the one they like best. In the following the effect of this procedure is illustrated by two independent design options I created for my website.
The first design option (on the left) has already been explained in the previous article. It features a tabular layout and various levels of grouping. The second design option (on the right) abandons the idea of hierarchical grouping. Instead the contents are organized horizontally by life domain (education, job, personal) and vertically by inner-domain grouping (academic degree/job type/personal interest). Again, the drawings are followed by a prototypical implementation adding further detail to the idea.
The first option has been enhanced by colors and shades to improve the cognitive-visual separability of the content. Instead, the second option was extended by introducing colors to separate header cells (education/job/personal) from content cells (academic degree/job type/personal interest). Secondly, logos of the universities and companies have been added as opposed to writing out their name.
A thought: Probably the translation process generally suffers from the same problem than the development of visual representations: The result depends on person and time and is unlikely to be the same in two independent cases.
Nevertheless, now you can give the two alternatives two a set of users and ask for their opinions. E.g. you can ask questions like “Which alternative do you prefer?” or “What advantages respectively disadvantages do you see in each alternative?”. Then, after collecting and evaluating tons of feedback you can continue by discarding alternatives, improving alternatives, introducing independent alterations of an existing alternatives, etc. After several repetitions of this procedure you should finally end up with a set of consolidated designs, which represent the way your users would like your software interface to be.
I hope the principles of repetitive and comparative interface design became clear through this article. In particular, you should notice that good interface design depends on the ideas of your designers, the feedback of your users, and a proper development process bringing everything together step by step. In the coming weeks I’ll try to collect feedback to explain the workings of the following research process. If you like, you could for example post your answers to the above questions (preference, pros/cons) to the comment box below. And while you’re at it, tell your friends and colleagues! The foundation of any good evaluation is the amount of feedback!