Good UI Examples:
- Wikipedia
-Wikipedia’s interface is designed to make searching through their online encyclopedia and retrieving the information you want simple and easy.
-Particularly, the interaction of searching for a specific page, and finding the information you want on that page seams very fast and easy to me.
-In terms of the principles, Wikipedia seems to be lacking in a bit of constraint. If you look at the side bar and header bars, you see a list of options you might never want/need to use. However, they make good use of consistency and affordances in their overall design.
- Tumblr (Dashboard)
-The Tumblr dashboard is an interface for presenting you with a chronological arrangement of posts from bloggers you follow.
-The dashboard specifically has a simplistic design that makes it simple to navigate and view posts in an uncluttered manner
-In terms of design principles, I would say that most are covered sufficiently, but the interface’s visibility and consistency are what stand out in making the interface very simple to use on first interaction.
Bad UI Examples:
- Facebook (Privacy Settings)
-The facebook privacy settings page is supposed to allow you to change who can see what content on your facebook page.
-I find the privacy settings particularly troublesome because they don’t make it easy to change your privacy settings to what you want them to be.
-The interface lacks in affordances, and it’s only when I first try to change a setting that I might learn that the other options exist and can be changed. There isn’t a clear mapping in the settings, and the lack of feedback makes it hard to tell whether or not you’ve made the right choices in settings.
-It may have been designed with the idea of capturing all possible privacy settings in one place (even though they’re separated between two tabs: “Privacy” and “Timeline & Tagging”), but I would suggest that they make the pages more apparent on the main page UI. Furthermore having the privacy settings for a specific post type come up when posting new content would ensure people could have an appropriate privacy level per post instead of having to go back and change privacy settings one by one.
- Perforce
-Perforce is a visual version control software for developers.
-Overall the UI for the dashboard (depot/workspace view) is cluttered and confusing.
-Visibility is especially low with this UI, and it’s hard to find the particular button or operation on sight alone. There’s a lack of constraint, which could be argued as a good thing, but for a new user it’s overwhelming. There’s not many affordances, and unless given instructions I wouldn’t even know what this software did. And feedback is there, but not significant.
-It might have been designed like this because it was created by engineers, or maybe because it’s for serious development teams with experience with version control software. Off the top of my head, just having separate screens might make it easier. That would allow more room for information to be displayed, such as button tooltips, your files, and whatever other information needs to be displayed to understand the interface.