Professor Peter Gregor

Human Computer Interaction and Usability Engineering links

Human Computer Interaction

The HCI Webliography is a huge reference and index to web-based HCI resources.

HCI Index is another excellent source of resources, from Hans de Graaf.

DTUI Booksite is basically the web companion to Ben Schneiderman's "Designing the User Interface" book, and an excellent companion it is too! Contains study guides, links and much more.

Fundamental principles for design and implementation of effective interfaces from Bruce Tognazzini are just that ... fundamental! Much other useful discussion and material at this site.

Task-Centered User Interface Design (Lewis & Rieman) is an online shareware textbook. The Contents page is HTML but the chapters have to be FTPed, so its interface is a bit footery (Scots).

The ACM SIGCHI Home Page (Special Interest Group in Computer Human Interaction) leads in all sorts of useful directions, including the proceedings of CHI, THE HCI conference.

HCI Bibliography, a listing of HCI resources on the Web which you can search. Some very useful links here, as well as many references to books and papers.

British HCI Group Web Resources contains lots of useful links to HCI related sites. Also carries job listings. Provided by the British HCI Group

MIT's Media-Lab is an interesting site to visit (but very busy).

Yahoo's HCI page gives a listing of HCI links

Bad Human Factors Designs from Michael Darnell at iQ Company

Usability Engineering

Jacob Nielsen's site from one of the most prominent players in the usability field. Many of his articles are online and there's a link here to his fortnightly Alertbox column

How to conduct an heuristic evaluation by Jacob Nielsen

The Evaluation Cookbook can be downloaded as a pdf file. This useful wee book was produced by The Learning Technology Dissemination Initiative, funded by the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council and is edited by Jen Harvey

IBM offers an excellent site called Ease of Use which covers and promotes User Centred Design principles and practice. Lots of examples and ideas and they even offer a process for designing user interfaces

And of course you would expect Microsoft to have their own usability resources.

Craig Marion's Usability Engineering provides a huge wealth of useful links to the topic

The Usability Methods Toolbox by James Hom is a very well structured introduction to the techniques and tools of usability engineering. Describes many usability testing techniques.

The The Usability Company is a leading UK commercial testing and consultancy company. Some useful Resources and look at "Our Approach" to get an idea of how usability is sold commercially.

SERCO Usability Services is a another UK commercial site with lots of useful stuff starting from their page. Used to be the National Physical Laboratory Usability Service

User Interface Engineering is a US commercial company whose site carries some thought provoking articles on (amongst other things) web usability, paper prototypes, tips and tabbed dialogs.
Click on Articles and Resources to get to the materials.

The Windows® 95 User Interface: A Case Study in Usability Engineering is just what it says. Carried out and reported by Microsoft at CHI 96. Some very interesting findings and interesting as a case study example. You can get to the rest of the conference proceedings from here as well.

Web Design & Accessibility

Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) - amongst other things, you'll find the classic reference on the design of web sites for accessibility

W3C (The World Wide Web Consortium) site. Loads of information and discussion on web design, standards etc.

W3C also produce a page of Quick Tips for those of you who are in a bit of a hurry.

Digital Media Access Group - website of leading UK accessibility experts (not that I'm biased or anything). Many useful articles and papers on the theme of accessibility. Also contains links to many other resources

Jacob Nielsen's site appears here as well because it concerns Web design

All things web: the usable web, contains some excellent guidelines on design and development for the web, from Terry Sullivan

Usable Web is Keith Instone's very informative site (which is still there, still useful, but no longer maintained

Go to Bobby and find out how accessible your web site is. A service provided by CAST (the Center for Applied Special Technology)

GUI design

Annoyances.org is an outsider's view through Windows, including some discussion of interaction issues and a very good animated gif

Nathan's Toasty Technology page is an irreverent gem of a site. One part charts (and illustrates) the history of GUIs of all types through screenshots and links. The site is provided by Nathan Lineback from Georgia (the one in USA) and includes a copy of the 1983 BYTE magazine article previewing Microsoft's as yet unreleased Windows software! It also includes an historical GUI Timeline. Thanks to Bruce Simpson for telling me about this

Guidebook provides lots of historical inspiration for interface ideas (thanks for the link Scott)

I would appreciate if you would e-mail useful new links and notify me of any dead links.
You can get me at: pgregor[at]computing.dundee.ac.uk

Last revised 30th March 2004