The Implementation of Computer User Interface, Essay Example

The implementation of information technology is the business world has so many thing connected to it. However, while the technical part of a program is what many designers find more interesting, this is different from the users of the system for they find the interface more interesting that what is actually behind the system. what you see is what you get is something that many people have used to evaluate most of the programs, thus a program with less attractive interface, even if it has the best coding and hence cannot break even after being subjected to a thousand trials, if its interface is not designed in the correct way the people will the program as either being adequate or rate it down (Shneiderman, 1998). What follows is an evaluation of an interface that is being used for terrorist suspect identification program.

Many people find the use of interface for finding files interesting since it can be used to find information for thing from all the categories that are available in a specific database. Whereas what we need is an interface for finding terrorists this user interface should be more advanced as far as the design is concerned. By looking at figure 1 what we see is the basic find file interface used by most of the people to search for files in folders. This design is almost the same as the one used by Microsoft OS to search for files in folders in their older XP window.

This interface is not bad but at the same time will not be appropriate for being used for terrorist information finding. For starters, the interface is not user friendly in that it does not really incorporate features that can be used by a person who is less computer literate. Someone looking for a file finder will not go for this interface since it looks old fashioned. This is even after recognizing the fact that the interface has other feature like file, edit, view options and help.

In addition to that, one will actually ask the question, where are we really finding the file from? it is also possible by looking at the interface that this program can only find files located in the C drive of a computer or files from the server computer, what if files are located in another computer other than the server computer, will it manage to actually find these files? in addition to that, it is possible that one does not know where the files are exactly in the C which means that this person will be subjected to guessing game.

On the contrary, a person may issue a search command for a file for which he does not have any idea where it is located, which means that the program will have to go through all the files drive by drive in order to actually find the file. The problem with this is that, it will take a long time to find one file. Thus while it is not attractive to the user, it is also not performance equitable.

On the other hand, it is possible that this UI can actually be improved to meet most of the needs. for starters, as many programs have their designs looking like the Apple Inc. designs; it is good that this interface too joins the league even though this will only add attractiveness to the UI. In addition to that, many people at the moment like to see the progress of what they are searching. This feature should also be incorporated in this design even if it means that its size will have to be increased. This feature as included in most of the program designs can be enabled in such a way that one is capable of viewing the progress or issue for the process to be hidden. Note that this will not improve the performance of the program since performance can only be improved by the machine and the coding used to create the program but since people will be seeing what they are searching for, they will not be tempted to stop the search due to the thought that it is taking a long time to complete (Parsons & Oja, 2011).

In addition to that, as you can see from this search interface, it is only one file that can be searched at one instance. It is time that people start utilizing the real power of computer and include in the search a feature that will enable multiple searching so that one will not always have to issue a new search at a time or have to wait for one search to compete before issuing for another search. Below is a screen shot for an ideal file search user interface (Stone, 2005).

This file search interface is more ideal in that it has more of the features that the other interface is lacking. In this search interface there is a big screen that shows all the files and their associated file path. It also includes other features that are important in the searching. In addition to that, this file search includes more categories like date and size that can be used for search.

References

Parsons, J.J., & Oja, D. (2011). New Perspectives on Computer Concepts 2012: Comprehensive. 14^th ed. Boston: Cengage Learning.

Shneiderman, B. (1998). Designing the user interface: strategies for effective human-computer-interaction. 3^rd ed. New York: Addison Wesley Longman.

Stone, D.L. (2005). User interface design and evaluation. Berlin: Morgan Kaufmann.