Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Discussion 5 User and User and Interface

On Tuesday, Tong and I hold a discussion about “user and user interface”. At first, thanks to our Gabriela’s direction during the discussion. Sorry to that I have a bad guiding.

In discussion, the thing I like best is the development of Microsoft Word. I think this is a very good doucument to demonstrate the improvement and role of interface. As we discuss, a good interface can bring convience to users and make things effective and efficient. However, excessive features also bring some trouble things, such as direction words of these may be confuse users and sometimes users can not identify which choice is what they want and try several times. Furthermore, some features are in the sub-menu, which makes it more difficult for users to interaction.

Secondly, in my opinion, some features should be used in different ways in different countries or cultures. For example, when I came Ireland I found the function “AutoCorrect” that is best for me now. When users have mistake of spelling or grammar it will have a green or red curve to remind users “You make a mistake”, which is useful for people whose mother language is not English. However, this function plays fewer roles because there is not spelling problem in Chinese and the grammar is not as complex as English. So this function may change into another one that is suit for Chinese in China or other languages in other countries.

These two points are I want to add.

Thanks to Gabriela’s help again.