Delineato: Designing Distraction-Free GUIs
Commenced in January 2007
Frequency: Monthly
Edition: International
Paper Count: 33122
Delineato: Designing Distraction-Free GUIs

Authors: Fernando Miguel Campos, Fernando Jesus Aguiar, Pedro Campos

Abstract:

A large amount of software products offer a wide range and number of features. This is called featuritis or creeping featurism and tends to rise with each release of the product. Feautiris often adds unnecessary complexity to software, leading to longer learning curves and overall confusing the users and degrading their experience. We take a look to a new design approach tendency that has been coming up, the so-called “What You Get is What You Need” concept that argues that products should be very focused, simple and with minimalistic interfaces in order to help users conduct their tasks in distraction-free ambiences. This isn’t as simple to implement as it might sound and the developers need to cut down features. Our contribution illustrates and evaluates this design method through a novel distraction-free diagramming tool named Delineato Pro for Mac OS X in which the user is confronted with an empty canvas when launching the software and where tools only show up when really needed.

Keywords: Diagramming, HCI, usability, user interface.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI): doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1108436

Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1436

References:


[1] F. Buschmann, “Learning from Failure, Part 2: Featuritis, Performitis, and Other Diseases”, IEEE Software 27, 1 (Jan. 2010), pp. 10-11.
[2] D. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things, New York, Double Day, 1990.
[3] J. Kim and D. H. Bae, An approach to feature-based software construction for enhancing maintainability: Papers from COMPSAC 2004. Softw. Pract. Exper. 36, 9 (July 2006), pp. 923-948.
[4] F. D. Davis, “Perceived Usefulness, Perceived Ease of Use and User Acceptance of Information Technology”. MIS Quarterly 13:(3), 1989.
[5] Richard Cobbet, MacWorld UK magazine, Issue 265 (October 2013).
[6] Josh Centers, “Mac Gems: Delineato Pro is a clean, inexpensive diagram and mind-mapping app”, MacWorld website (May 2013).