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More about Views in MVC

Read more about MVC

Views and User Interfaces

A View consists of two components:

  • User Interfaces
  • User Interaction

User Interfaces

Overview

User Interfaces are the design for interactions with the users. The goals of a good user interface are:

  • The interface should be simple, i.e., easy for user to handle and understand.
  • The interface should be efficient.
  • The interface should be accessible to most of the users, i.e., it has some features for users with visual impairments, hearing impairments and so on.
  • (Optional) The interface should be asthetically pleasing. The interface should not be filles with many colours or fonts. It should be simple and elegant.

Tip

A great article on guidelines for design: Ten Usabilty Heuristics

Creating a good UI

To create a good user interface, the following approach can be used:

  • Step 1: Understand what are the needs for the potential client that will use the interface.
  • Step 2: Create a prototype interface and present them to your clients.
  • Step 3: After the approval of prototype, the interface should be given out to a small set of potential users for testing, that return feedback.

Examples

User Interfaces can be of many kinds. A few of them may be:

  • Screen
  • Audio
  • Haptic feedback
  • and so on....

User Interactions

The devices through which a user can interact with the application are called user interaction devices.

They can be of many types. Some examples are:

  • Keyboard/Mouse
  • Audio Inputs
  • Motor Inputs
  • Custom Buttons

The user interactions are largely determined by hardware constraints. For e.g., you cannot access a desktop game that requires a mouse or keyboard on your mobile phone. To overcome this, User-Agent information can be used.

Types of Views

There are many kinds of views:

  • Fully Static Web Pages: These pages are completely static and do not require any computations on the client side. For example, the about us page on any website.
  • Partially Dynamic Web Pages: These pages are partially dynamic and require some computations on the client side. For example, a blog which needs to fetch the posts but the headers and footers are static.
  • Mostly Dynamic Web Pages: These pages are mostly dynamic and require a lot of computations on the client side. For example, an ecommerce app.