Problem Statement
Building good user interfaces is no trivial task. Many UCB campus web developers lack time and expertise for UI design or focus too intently on creating a distinctive visual design for specific sites. Budgets do not include allotments for UI designers or usability experts. Even when a web application developer consciously focuses on user interface design, the resulting application can have usability, consistency, and interoperability problems.
We propose a user interface design pattern management system to provide basic UI components and conventions to help alleviate or at least minimize these problems. While nothing can replace a UI designer in an application's development, such a library could help improve usability on projects without the budget for a designer, or even help create some level of consistency across project that do have designers.
Primary Users
Our primary users are UC Berkeley employees who maintain or build web interfaces. Their web design responsibilities vary, however there are three main categories of users:
Novice Designer: This person spends very little time on web projects as it is not part of their core job description or expertise. However, this person is responsible for maintaining and periodically modifying a department website which is small and does not merit a full-time staff with the appropriate expertise. This person is faced with making interface design decisions but has little or no design skills.
Programmer: This person is highly technical and spends most of his or her time coding applications. By default, this person is responsible for the interface design due to staff resource constraints. As a result, this person has little design experience or desire to design but has the skills to implement a design.
Designer: This person is responsible for the user interface design of web sites or applications as a core job function, and is aware of good design practice.
Participants
We have access to a large number of participants (120) that fit the description above. These participants volunteered for user research through a survey distributed in December 2006.