ATAG2: Ideas for "Prominence"

Hi all,

When we went over prominence on Monday I liked Jeanne's suggestion 
(which I worked in under #2), but also felt that some extra bloat could 
be trimmed from the rest...so here's a suggested rewording:


prominence

A heuristic measure of how likely users are to notice items in a user 
interface that they are operating. In ATAG 2.0, prominence considers 
both visual and non-visual (keyboard-only) modes of operation. Some of 
the factors that contribute to prominence include:

1. order: items that occur early in the reading order are usually more 
prominent,

2. grouping: items that occur early in the reading order of each 
grouping are usually more prominent (e.g., the early items in nested menus),

3. steps required: items that require more navigation steps to operate, 
usually have less prominence (e.g., items on "advanced" property dialogs),

4. size: larger items are usually more visually prominent,

5. spacing: items surrounded by extra white space are usually more 
visually prominent,

6. highlighting: items that are highlighted using icons, color, styling, 
etc. are usually more visually prominent.




Cheers,
Jan


-- 
Jan Richards, M.Sc.
User Interface Design Lead
Adaptive Technology Resource Centre (ATRC)
Faculty of Information (i-school)
University of Toronto

   Email: jan.richards@utoronto.ca
   Web:   http://jan.atrc.utoronto.ca
   Phone: 416-946-7060
   Fax:   416-971-2896



-- 
Jan Richards, M.Sc.
User Interface Design Lead
Adaptive Technology Resource Centre (ATRC)
Faculty of Information (i-school)
University of Toronto

   Email: jan.richards@utoronto.ca
   Web:   http://jan.atrc.utoronto.ca
   Phone: 416-946-7060
   Fax:   416-971-2896

Received on Wednesday, 25 February 2009 15:21:22 UTC