User Interface
User InterfaceUserInterface is the point of contact between the person or people using an application or system and the system itself.
UserInterface is usually considered under the rubric of HumanComputerInteraction which is considered a subdiscipline of computer science and is usually divided into the following categories.
GraphicDesign can be abused; it is a subset of interface design
GraphicDesign is hardly a "subset of interface design". There is an intersection. The visual languages that make movies, magazines, and even roadsigns "work" have nothing (and everything) to do with UserInterface.
Some resources:
UserInterface is easy to do badly, hard to do well, extremely rewarding and gratifying when done right.
WikiPages About UserInterface
The term UserInterface Contains some fairly deepseated and not too healthy assumptions about the state of the world, I personally prefer the term HumanInterface. UserInterface carries with it all the cultural baggage the term user (occasionally: luser) has in the world of programmers and engineers. The contempt and arrogance of this attitude is counterproductive and has produced more bad side effects than any other widely held bias in the InformationSystemsProfessions?, it is good practice to as much as possible expand the term user to be PeopleUsingTheSystem?. -- LarryPrice
"User", perhaps, but "luser" originates with MIT's Incompatible Timesharing System, wherein it was an abbreviation for "Logged-in User". Although even there the pun on "loser" was irresistible, still, this was an OS where the login shell was a debugger; there were no idiot users, everyone was a programmer. So the jokes punning on "loser" had a very different weight than modern jokes about users such as the classic Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair. -- dm
I'm wondering if we could use a Category Usability or some such to collect some of the issues here, and refer to contributors to them: DonaldNorman, JakobNielsen, and StewartBrand (for HowBuildingsLearn). Certainly, ChristopherAlexander cares a lot about usability.
Or is 'usability' too amorphous as a category? -- JeffreyMiller
"usability" is not too amorphous, but it is perhaps too narrow. The wider terms are Human Factors or ergonomics (semi-pseudonymous), or Computer Human Interfaces (CHI) for Human Factors specific to computers (some chairs are ergonomic).
A list of general-purpose human-computer UserInterfaces and projects thereof.
Complete interfaces:
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