Possible topic for discussion

[GregPayne]

Hi Steve,

Something I have been thinking about for a while and always stumps me is choosing the best way to display different types of data. I know this might be application specific, but some general ideas might be good.

Recently I've started working on more application based systems (rather than pure test systems) and choosing what to display where I find tricky. I have a techie brain, not a graphic design brain!!!!

Leading on to this is GUI design, how the user feels and interacts with the GUI. (There was a talk done at the CLD summit last year but the presentation or code was never uploaded to the forum as far as I can find)

These are two topics that I am interesed in learning more about so maybe someone can present at the March/July CSLUG?

Cheers,

Greg

[swatts]

You are not alone (I scraped through my UI design course!)

Maybe to start to the process we should research first....

So here's some group homework for us (potential topic for quickfire rounds)

User Interface Design - Educational resources review

One resource I have been pointed to before is the Microsoft UI rules.

The Design of Everyday Things - Author Don Norman.

I think after that we could put together a presentation as a group.

I have ideas on restricting options as a design method (i.e. linking a wizard to a state machine, tabs are related to states)

Gateways are also very useful (again limiting options and testing against those options)

That would be a nice set of work.

[GregPayne]

Sounds good.

I've just registered for a course on udemy so will see how that goes over the next few weeks, always keen to learn new skills!!

[FabiolaDelaCueva]

swatts wrote:

User Interface Design - Educational resources review

I don't think the underlined text was a link, I couldn't make it work.

I mentioned a couple of UI design things on my NI Week presentation of 2013, Steve Watts gave a version of this presentation at NI Days as well: bit.ly/fabniweek2013

There is also this book from 2001 "LabVIEW GUI Essential Techniques", it is super expensive on Amazon. If anyone has a kindle and you are interested, I can loan you the book. The kindle lets you keep it in your kindle for one month. A lot of the things discussed on the book are ancient now, but some of the concepts will still be valid.

It all boils down to keeping it simple and aiming for providing the best user experience: Make the end user feel smart.

I am looking forward to what you guys put together.

Regards,

Fab

[GregPayne]

Thanks Fab,

I think the underlined text was meant to be an option for a topic of discussion rather than a hyperlink!

I'll take a look at that LabVIEW book on Amazon. Although LabVIEW is our software of choice, I feel we can take tools and ideas from other languages and sources that will be better suited to a GUI designed with the user in mind. (In my opinion)

I am a long way away from being a graphic designer, but if we can make the LabVIEW user experience more like the web for example, we might be able to win over people who are used to 'pretty' and easy to follow GUI's.

Either way, it should be fun to research and learn something out of my comfort zone.

Greg

[swatts]

Yup UI fail, taking a standard and not following it through!

There are design rules that can be applied to any UI design. <-- personally I'd like the discussion to concentrate on this.

or

There are also techniques to enrich the LabVIEW experience.

Under the latter I'd to call upon Dr Powell to show us how to do the graph overlays that he showed last time (I haven't had time to check it out and like the idea of it)

I can demo my tree-->dB stuff if anyone is interested.

[James_McN]

I think this is a really interesting thread of discussion that I am very interested in.

My level of interest is still at quite a conceptual/platform-agnostic level still at the minute. Questions that I'd love to explore is:

• How to keep things clean and simple and still functional (for example having menus that can slide away).
• Making sure the user gets the most from their data. Keeping the useful information front and center and letting the user drive the complexity. An example of this is I have now worked on a couple projects where I have tried to do this by using xtabs or floating graphs so the user can choose how much to see and how to organise it. Rather than the original system that had several graphs on every display!

OK and ultimately how can we do this in LabVIEW, the problem is it is so hard to experiment with the LabVIEW GUI (because it is so cumbersome to customise) that I'm trying to use more web-based projects to experiment and bring this ideas back to LabVIEW

[swatts]

I had multiple graphs and the option to undock, customer never used the multiples, so I took them out. I find the removal of things from the UI very satisfying.

Do you all think we should do a more academic session first, I quite like the idea of a session summarising the various resources, leading up to another session with some conclusions. I also like the idea of a joint presentation on this sort of thing, maybe leading up to a user-group track at NIDays (if such a thing happens )

Thoughts?

[swatts]

Appeared on my FB page care of Jarobit

[swatts]

I'm researching this podcast http://www.freshtilledsoil.com/ will summarise, I'll probably review The Design Of Everyday Things too as I have a copy somewhere.