Chapter 10
Principles of User Interface Design
IN THIS CHAPTER
Following the evolution of user interfaces
Defining the elements of a user interface
Designing a user interface
You can divide every program into two parts: a user interface (UI) and the part of the program that actually does something useful, such as predicting winning lottery numbers or editing video images.
The whole purpose of a UI is to give a program a way to
- Accept commands from the user.
- Accept data from the user.
- Display information back to the user.
The UI basically lets you give information to a program and receive useful information back again, as shown in Figure 10-1. Without a UI, you can’t control a program or retrieve any useful information from the program. The best UI is the one that makes it easy for someone to use the program regardless of how ugly the UI may look to others.
FIGURE 10-1: The user interface lets you control a program, give it commands, and retrieve useful information back.
The Evolution of User Interfaces
To better understand UIs, you need to know how they’ve evolved and how current ...
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