The Effect of the Placement of UI Elements on User Experience – Case GNOME 40

The placement of the user interface elements naturally has an effect on the user experience. The goal of this study is to find out if moving the panel of the GNOME Shell UI from the top to the bottom of the screen would help users primarily using mouse for interaction. The study was motivated by a change in the GNOME Shell UI layout introduced by GNOME 40 that increased the distance between crucial elements of the UI and thus the amount of mouse travel required for certain basic tasks. This caused some concern in the community, both among the users and contributors of GNOME. Two prototypes, representing the layout of GNOME Shell 40 and an alternative layout pro-posed by a GNOME design team member, were produced. These prototypes were evaluated by test users in an unmoderated, remote sessions. After testing both prototypes, the users were asked to state which layout they preferred and for what reasons. 22 of the 33 participants that completed the tasks preferred the proposed alternative layout which required less mouse travel. 8 of those explicitly mentioned mouse usability as a reason for their preference. Overall, the most common reason for the participants’ preferences ap-peared to be familiarity of a given layout. These findings give reasons to cautiously recommend the GNOME project to switch to a layout with the panel at the bottom. However, because of certain limitations of this study, a primary recommendation is to conduct some further research to confirm these findings

Optimization Based Touchscreen Graphical User Interface Design

Tablets have been increasing in popularity throughout the past couple years and developers are designing their graphical user interfaces (GUIs) with this trend in mind. This thesis attempts to examine how a process can be designed to automatically create a GUI layout for a menu driven interface based on predetermined criteria. The effectiveness of the system along with a qualitative analysis of GUIs was examined through the use of human subjects testing ATM designs on a tablet. A three-way ANOVA was designed to see if Gender, the type of Form, or if the order they did their testing was a significant factor in how fast a subject was able to complete certain tasks and what they thought of each of these forms. While these results were not able to prove which form could be completed the fastest because of an interaction between blocking and forms, the subject’s ratings were able to demonstrate their high preference towards a system that was more simplified. They felt that a simpler designed interface is more aesthetic and usable. The subjects also had a higher sense of satisfaction while using a simple form. This thesis provides background for future research in designing a process that can automatically determine the layout of a menu driven system