Toward a Minimalist Interface

Frank Vetere
Melbourne University

Tuesday 13 November at 11am

Abstract

Minimalism (Carroll 1990) has had a significant influence on the way many technical writers approach instructional design. Carroll and others have suggested that minimalist principals (e.g. action-oriented, domain centered, supporting error recognition and recovery) are not restricted to manual design but are also well suited to interface design. However, there are only a few good examples of minimalism at the interface. Most instantiations of minimalism have been in user-manuals and paper-based documentation rather than interface design specifically.

What might a true minimalist interface look like? This seminar looks at applying the extensive design knowledge arising from minimalism to designing the computer-human interface. The discuss will focus on examples and methods for extending minimalism beyond the minimal-manual to the minimal-user-interface.

Short resume

Frank Vetere is a lecturer at the University of Melbourne (Department of Information Systems), teaching and researching in the area of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Frank worked as a secondary school teacher for several years before discovering HCI and being fascinated by questions concerning the effective design of technology for human activity. His current research interests include usability engineering, media integration, and instructional design. Frank has worked as a HCI consultant for IBM GSA, UC Design, DSTO, and Pacific Access, and is currently completing his PhD on "Redundancy at the Multimedia Interface"

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