In this post, l’m trying to explain some concepts or standards that designers follow when building user interfaces. This is a topic that can be filled under human computer interaction or just designing interfaces to satisfy some user needs. There are many goals that designers try to reach when building interfaces but I’ll just touch few of them and give snapshots and domain of some websites that either comply or violate any of these goals based on how I understand it. The opinion I’m expressing here is just mine and can not be used against any of the sites that l’m going to talk about. This is simply for sharing knowledge and can not be construed as a policy to underrate any work by those sites. Ok, enough of that rant, here goes what l’m trying to talk about. This information is good for people who want to design interfaces and are struggling to know how to lay out the structure so that users can have a nice experience using it.
1. The Usability goal of learnability.
This goal is to make sure that users can easily recognize and use features of the interface. That is, do you want people to always hold manuals before using your interface or do you want them to easily remember what most of the features of the interface does after their first experience. For this example, I have taken a look at a site that is very hard for me to learn or remember how to quickly navigate it without trying to guess. This site is http://www.lingscars.com/ . This site has many things crowed on it making it ridiculously uncomfortable for me to even click on anything. It takes long for me to even trust it’s a legitimate site and will not send me to any of those spam sites when l click on anything. Now, this is just my opinion. Here is a snap shot of the site. 
2. Presence: When designing interfaces, it’s good and very important to build an interface that has features very close to the real world implementation of what you are designing. For example, if you are designing a game about soccer. You can’t design an interface with hoes and cutlasses on the field for user to use for this game. You want to put features like soccer ball, referee, whistle, goal posts etc on this interface to make the user feel like they are on a real soccer stadium. There are lot of virtual reality games and applications out there and their main goal is to give the user enough presence using the interface as much as possible. You can play some games it will make you forget it’s not real and think you are actually living in those worlds. Its true, some people can get drunk playing a game where they compete in alcohol consumption on the computer lol. This was one of the ideas employed in designing computer desktops in the first place. It’s supposed to be like an office where you have your files stored, you can open through and find stuff. It has the trash can where you can throw away files you don’t want in the office but you can get them back from the trash can when you need them. Just like a real office, you can’t drag files into the trash can and assume that’s the end of it, you must dump it out and that’s exactly what the computer desktop offers. To completely get rid of the file, you empty the trash can. I try to find a site that has presence and the one l’m able to find is http://www.templar.com/ . This site is for a game development company so when you get to the site and start navigating it, you are definitely going to think you are playing some sort of game but its a website. They want to make you feel the presence of a game world even on their website. here is a snap shot of the site
3. Direct Manipulation This is something also very interesting and it’s one of the cool stuffs applications and interfaces have to offer. Direct manipulation is how users interact directly and use features of the application. For example, when you are build a site for online store, you want to have something like a shop cart users can take stuff from your shells and put them inside. the best way to accomplish this direct manipulation is for the user to be able to drag an item on sale and put it in their shopping cart. Clicking “Buy now” or ” Add to Cart” is not direct manipulation. Imagine going to walmart and just tapping your finger on items in the shell and expect them to jump into your shopping cart lol. However, it takes some work to accomplish this direct manipulation skills online so you’ll find more add or buy now buttons than dragging items to your cart, and simply dragging them out of your cart when you don’t want it. An example of a site that has direct manipulation implemented is http://www.panic.com/goods/. You can experience direct manipulation by dragging items into your shopping cart and taking them out by dragging it out. Here is a snap shot
4. Symmetry:
This is the last thing l’m talking about but there are lot of things out there to look for when designing interfaces.
Symmetry is just about how you arrange things on the interface. Do you pair up large items with large items on opposite sites or do you just mix everything up. If you arrange objects on the interface to present a mirror like image of the other on each side, your interface is said to have symmetry. Here is a site that l think have symmetry, www.icora.com
The icora.com site has the site symmetrically divide by their logo in the center and the content of the pages are divided into sections on each side of the line of symmetry.
here is a snap shot of the site
if you have more ideas, please share it with the community.
