Day: June 4, 2002

Cooper has an excellent monthly newletter about design issues. In the May issue, they discuss the problems of bad mapping using Donald Norman’s classic stove burner control placement example.

Human Factors International describes the benefits of Parallel Design. In parallel design, user interface designers first consider as many alternative designs as possible. They then select the best one and begin an iterative refinement process. By evaluating many alternative solutions first, the result is often better than iterations of a single design. Interestingly, they found that by evaluating multiple designs, the designers were able to rapidly find consensus on the optimal design approach.