User-Centered Web Site Design
To be published by Prentice Hall 2003
Daniel D. McCracken
City College, City University of New York
Rosalee J. Wolfe
DePaul University
Supported by NSF CCLI EMD grant DUE 0088184
Contents
1.
Human-Computer Interaction: An Overview1.1
Introduction1.2
What is HCI?1.3 Goals of HCI
1.4 User-Centered Development Methodology
1.5 Characteristics of User-Centered Development
2.
Capabilities of Human Beings2.1 Introduction
2.2 Senses
2.3 Perception
2.4 Memory
2.5 Interruptions
2.6 Mental Models
2.7 Metaphors
2.8 Perceived Affordance
2.9 Some Design Implications
3. Know Thy User: User and Task Analysis
3.1 Introduction
3.2 User Analysis
3.3 Task Analysis
3.4 Environment Analysis
3.5 Recruiting Users
3.6 Usability Specifications
4. Content Organization
4.1. Purpose
4.2. Organizational Systems
4.3. Research and Interview Techniques
5. Visual Organization
5.1 Introduction
5.2 The Four Principles
5.3 Proximity
5.4 Alignment
5.5 Consistency
5.6 Contrast
5.7 Putting it All Together
5.8 Summary
6. Navigation
6.1 Introduction
6.2 Strategies for Effective Site Navigation
6.3 Effective Navigation at the Page Level
6.4 Conclusion
7. Prototyping
7.1 Why prototype?
7.2 Basic Terminology
7.3 Benefits of Prototyping
7.4 Disadvantages
7.5 Low-fidelity prototyping
7.6 Building a Paper Prototype
7.7 What’s next?
8. Evaluation
8.1 Why test?
8.2 When to test?
8.3 Expert-based Evaluation
8.4 User Testing with a Paper Prototype
8.5 Conducting a Test
8.6 Evaluating Results
8.7 Refining the Design
8.8 Writing the Report
8.9 Conclusions
9. Color
9.1. Introduction
9.2. The Physics of Color
9.3. The Human Vision System
9.4. Color Representation Systems
9.5. Color Harmony Schemes
9.6. Text Color and Background Color
9.7. Further Design Considerations
9.8. Color Blindness
9.9. Cultural Differences in Color Symbolism
10. Typography
10.1 Top-level characterization of font families
10.2 Basic terminology as applied to the Web.
10.3 Web realities: You are at the mercy of your user’s browser
10.4 Escaping the browser straitjacket: text in graphics, SVG
11. Multimedia
11.1 Overview
11.2 Audio
11.3 Video
11.4 3-D
11.4 Animation
11.5 File formats and performance considerations
12. Graphic File Compression
12.1 Introduction
12.2 Overview of Compression
12.3 GIF and JPEG: When to Use Which
12.4 How GIF Compression Works
13. Accessibility
13.1. Introduction
13.2. The Scope of the Challenge
13.3. Visual Impairments
13.4 Motor Impairments
13.5 Deafness
14. Globalization and Future Trends
14.1 Symbolism of gesture, icons, vocabulary
14.2 Cultural idioms
14.3 Screen layout considerations (left-to-right and right-to-left, other)
14.4 Multilingual vs. translated pages
14.5. Testing sites internationally
Appendix: XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets
Bibliography
Index