Resources

[1] McSkeane, L. ”An Employer’s Guide to Basic Skills at Work.” National Adult Literacy Agency, 2006.

“An Employer's Guide to Basic Skills at Work” describes the importance of basic skills in the workplace and the importance of ensuring people continue to have the knowledge and basic skills needed to fully contribute to the workplace. The book describes the issue of losing customers and profits due to mistakes that could be prevented by having basic writing, literacy, and mathematics skills. It explores the underlying cause of these issues and how to take action to remedy the issue from the employer’s viewpoint.

[2] Matthews, T., Forlizzi, J., Rohrbach, S. “Designing Glanceable Peripheral Displays.” UCB/EECS Technical Report, 2006.

This article explores ‘glanceable’ displays, or displays from which users can understand information quickly and easily. Several peripheral displays such as gear shifts and periodic tables were examined to produce a taxonomy of visual design variables. The researchers then designed thirty versions of an email display and evaluated them. Variables which were rated well for glanceability were representative images, colored backgrounds and multiple dots. The following four glanceable display design principles were the result of this research: match user expectation, use abstraction representations, make visual distinct, and maintain consistency.

[3] Jose, D., C, L., Priyadarshini, G., Singh, M. “Challenges and Issues in Android App Development- An Overview.” International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer Science and Software Engineering, 2015.

This article describes the challenges and issues that arose as the research group developed a restaurant service application for the Android platform. The article gives an overview of the Android system architecture and the working principle of Android applications. The authors then describe their restaurant service app system and provide limitations of their system and propose a new system. Challenges that the group encountered during the development of their app was making the app’s interface simple without losing usefulness and finalizing the target for their app due to the large amount and quick release of new Android versions and hardware.

[4] Sethumadhavan, A. “Principles for Designing Good User Interfaces.” Ergonomics in Design: The Quarterly of Human Factors Applications, 2013.

This research digest compiles several human-computer interaction articles into a concise list of ideas and principles to keep in mind when designing good user interfaces. First, the digest suggests minimizing the use of scrolling as scrolling negatively affects the comprehension of complex text. The negative effect is particularly prevalent in people with low working memory, potentially because of difficulty in integrating information regularly or disorientation during reading. Paginated forms with meaningful subheadings are suggested to promote better learning. Another principle is using appropriate color scales for data visualization tasks. For example, multi-colored scales are more effective in identification tasks while brightness scales are better for comparison tasks.

[5] Savio, N., Braiterman, J. “Design Sketch: The Context of Mobile Interaction.” International Journal of Mobile Marketing, 2007.

This article describes how users interact with their mobile devices and highlights constraints that mobile software often has to adapt to. It presents a generalized context diagram for mobile applications and can be used to reference solutions for common development challenges. This article serves its main purpose in helping plan the functional requirements of the application. The context diagram presented can serve to help anticipate requirements a user might expect. It discusses the context of a mobile application at a higher level however so more specific design details will defer to other articles. This article is helpful for anticipating the most common contexts that surround mobile applications. The material make it a good reference to look at anytime the application is planning on expanding.