Java Look and Feel Design Guidelines: Advanced Topics

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Java Look and Feel Design Guidelines: Advanced Topics provides guidelines for anyone designing user interfaces for applications written in the JavaTM programming language. In particular, this book offers design guidelines for applications that use the Java look and feel. This book supplements Java Look and Feel Design Guidelines, 2d ed. For details on that book, see Related Books. 

Although some topics in Java Look and Feel Design Guidelines: Advanced Topics apply only to certain types of applications, most topics apply to all applications that use the Java look and feel. 

Who Should Use This Book 
Primarily, this book addresses the designer who chooses an application's user-interface elements, lays them out in a set of components, and designs the user interaction model for an application. This book should also prove useful for software developers, technical writers, graphic artists, production and marketing specialists, and testers who help create applications that use the Java look and feel. 

Java Look and Feel Design Guidelines: Advanced Topics focuses on design issues and human-computer interaction in the context of the Java look and feel. For information about technical aspects of the Java Foundation Classes (JFC), visit the JFC and Swing Connection web sites: 

http://java.sun.com/products/jfc 
http://java.sun.com/products/jfc/tsc 
The guidelines in this book are appropriate for GUI applications that run on personal computers and network computers. These guidelines are not intended for software that runs on consumer electronic devices, such as wireless telephones or personal digital assistants (PDAs). 

How to Use This Book 
This book is intended to be read in its entirety or to be consulted as a reference on particular topics. The information in this book is easier to understand if you first read Java Look and Feel Design Guidelines, 2d ed. If you read only particular topics in this book, you should also see any corresponding topics in that book. 

This book assumes that you are familiar with the terms and concepts in Java Look and Feel Design Guidelines, 2d ed., which is available in printed form at bookstores and as hypertext at the following web address: 

http://java.sun.com/products/jlf 
In addition, this book assumes that you are using the default Java look and feel theme, as described in Chapter 4 of Java Look and Feel Design Guidelines, 2d ed. 

What Is in This Book 
This book contains two main parts-- 
"General Topics" and "Special Topics." 

Part One, "General Topics," consists of chapters whose user interface guidelines apply to most applications. 

Chapter 1, "Introduction," explains why a consistent look and feel is important in applications and describes characteristics of well-designed applications. 
Chapter 2, "Windows," defines user-interface objects and then describes various types of windows. In addition, the chapter describes how to choose the right window type, design window elements, set the state of windows, and handle multiple windows. 
Chapter 3, "Menus," provides guidelines for designing menu elements, common menus (such as File, Edit, and Help), and contextual menus. The chapter also provides guidelines for assigning mnemonics and keyboard shortcuts to menu items. 
Chapter 4, "Behavior," discusses modes of user interaction, multiple selection, filtering, searching, and tool tips. 
Chapter 5, "Idioms," describes how to use sets of JFC components to achieve a standardized appearance and behavior. In particular, the chapter discusses idioms for tables, text fields, lists, and hierarchies of user-interface objects. 
Chapter 6, "Responsiveness," discusses characteristics of responsive applications, describes how responsiveness relates to performance and to response delay, explains how to measure response delay, and describes ways to improve responsiveness and provide operational feedback to users. 
Part Two, "Special Topics," consists of chapters whose guidelines apply only to applications that include wizards or alarms. 

Chapter 7, "Wizards," introduces wizards and then describes how to decide whether your users need a wizard, how to design the layout and behavior of wizards, and what other factors to consider when designing wizards. 
Chapter 8, "Events and Alarms," defines the terms "event" and "alarm" and then provides information on how to display alarm views (representations of alarms) and how to manipulate alarm views (for example, by sorting them at a user's request). 
What Is Not in This Book 
This book does not provide detailed discussions of human interface design principles or the design process, nor does it present information about task analysis--an essential concept in user interface design. For resources on these topics, see Related Books and "Related Books and Web Sites" in Java Look and Feel Design Guidelines, 2d ed. 

Many of this book's guidelines can be applied to applications that use the Java look and feel to display text in any language. However, the usability of the book's guidelines and examples has been tested only with languages in which users read left to right. If you are designing for users who read right to left, use your judgment to decide whether this book's guidelines regarding layout are appropriate for your application.   

Task-Centered User Interface Design - A Practical Introduction

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0.1 What's This Book All About? 
The central goal of this book is to teach the reader how to design user interfaces that will enable people to learn computer systems quickly and use them effectively, efficiently, and comfortably. The interface issues addressed are primarily cognitive, that is, having to do with mental activities such as perception, memory, learning, and problem solving. Physical ergonomic issues such as keyboard height or display contrast are covered only briefly. 

0.1.1 Who Should Be Reading the Book? 
We've designed this book to be most useful for people who are actually developing user interfaces. That's in contrast to the full-time interface professionals who do research and evaluation in large corporations. We strongly believe that effective interactive systems require a commitment and an understanding throughout the entire development process. It just won't work to build a complete system and then, in the final stages of development, spread the interface over it like peanut butter. 

With that in mind, some of the people who should be interested in this book are programmers, systems analysts, users and user-group representatives, technical writers, training coordinators, customer representatives, and managers at several levels. All of these positions have input into how the final system will look and act. 

0.1.2 What Is the User Interface? 
The basic user interface is usually understood to include things like menus, windows, the keyboard, the mouse, the "beeps" and other sounds the computer makes, and in general, all the information channels that allow the user and the computer to communicate. 

Of course, using a modern computer system also involves reading manuals, calling help lines, attending training classes, asking questions of colleagues, and trying to puzzle out how software operates. A successful computer system or software package supports those activities, so that support is part of the user interface too. 

But in a sense, all of these parts are the "peanut butter" we mentioned in the previous section. No matter how well they are crafted, the interface will be a failure if the underlying system doesn't do what the user needs, in a way that the user finds appropriate. In other words, the system has to match the users' tasks. That's why the book's central message is the need for "task-centered" design, and that's why the design of the user interface can't be separated from the design of the rest of the system. 

0.1.3 What Kind of User Interfaces Does This Book Cover? 
The principles presented in this book were developed primarily in the context of the interfaces to computer software and hardware, but they are also applicable to a wide variety of other machines, from complex equipment such as phone systems and video cameras to simple appliances like refrigerators and power tools. Simpler machines are sometimes informative examples of problems or solutions in interface design. 

0.1.4 Why Focus on Design? 
This book describes design processes that help to produce good interfaces. The focus on process instead of end result deserves some explanation. Why don't we simply describe what a good interface is and leave the reader to create interfaces that fit that description? 

There are several reasons. An interface has to be matched to the task it will support, as well as to the users who will work with it. There is an infinite variety of tasks and users, so there's no simple definition of a "good" interface. There have been many attempts to give broad, general guidelines for good interfaces, but those guidelines are usually too vague to be of much use. For example, a general guideline might say, "Give adequate feedback." But how will the designer determine what's "adequate"? 

More specific guidelines for elements of the final interface have also been developed, describing such elements as how menus should be designed, how to label icons, and so forth. These guidelines also have problems. It's impossible to cover every possible combination of task, user, and interface technology, so no set of specific guidelines can be complete. Even so, lists of specific guidelines are often so large and cumbersome that practicing designers find them very difficult to use. Further, in a given situation there are often several contradictory guidelines, and the designer has to rely on intuition to decide which are most important. 

We might make an analogy between a designing a successful interface and a cutting a piece of string to the "right" length. General guidelines for the length of a piece of string, such as "long enough to do the job," aren't very helpful; and a list of specific definitions of the correct length for every purpose would be endless: 6 inches to tie up sagging flowers, 42 inches for a small package, 78 inches to tie down the trunk on an old VW, etc. But it's easy to describe a process that produces the right length: start with a very long piece of string, tie up your plant, package, car, or whatever, and then cut off the string that's not being used. Similarly, instead of specifying all the characteristics of the finished interface, this book present a design process that can produce good interfaces. 

This is not to say that simply following the design process will magically produce a successful interface every time. The designer using the process must make many decisions along the way, relying on knowledge of users, their cognitive skills and limitations, and their tasks. In addition, the interface design process will only be successful if it is integrated into the software production process as a whole. This book presents basic information about all of these issues, and it contains pointers to other books and articles containing further useful information. All this material is organized in the context of the design process.