User and System Interfaces Cheat Sheet by NatalieMoore

User is the last judge of the quality of a system. Ie will it help them perform their task?
Principles of User Centered Design:
1. Focus early on users and their work
2. Evaluate designs to ensure usability
3. Use iterative develo­pment

Menus are a typical way to organize access to use case functi­onality
Different menus for different actors
Useful to design an overall menu hierarchy and then subsets for different users

Primary Objective is Error Free Input
Use electronic devices wherever possible
Avoid human involv­ement as much as possible
If inform­ation is already available in electronic form, use it instead of re-ent­ering inform­ation
Validate and correct inform­ation at time and location entered
Device Examples
Magnetic card strip readers, bar code readers, optical character recogn­ition, radio frequency ID tags (RFID), touch screen, electronic pens, digiti­zers, speech recogn­ition

Detailed reports: specific inform­ation on business transa­ctions
Summary reports: summarize detail or recap periodic activity
Exception reports: provide details or summary inform­ation about transa­ctions or operating results that fall outside a predefined normal range of values
Executive reports: used by high level managers to assess overall organi­zat­ional health and perfor­mance
Internal outputs produced for use within the organi­zation
External outputsproduced for use by people outside the organi­zation. Statem­ents, notices, stockh­older reports. Higher quality, color, reflect image of organi­zation
Turnaround documents external outputs that includes one or more parts intended to be returned with new data or inform­ation. Bills with remittance vouchers

Consis­tency
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) – Web page encoding standard that enables a Web site designer to specify parts of a page that will always look the same and parts that will vary by task or audience
Perfor­mance Consid­era­tions
Sensitive to network connec­tion, amount of inform­ation transm­itted, type of inform­ation transm­itted
Pictures, Video, and Sound
Powerful, but compat­ibility issues arise