Glossary » q
qualifier key
a key on the keyboard that modifies the meaning of other keys that are used along with it, e.g. shift, control, alt, and command keys.
Read more »quality assurance
QA or quality control; ensuring that the results of your processes have high quality, measured my minimization of flaws in design and production and by product success and customer satisfaction. Quality assurance can be implemented throughout a design process (not…
Read more »quality inspection
reviewing a user interface for its conformance to style guidelines and specifications, especially with regard to required functionality and robustness (frequency of system errors) because these have a dramatic effect on usability. The purpose of a quality inspection is to…
Read more »query box
a type of dialog box that poses a question to the user and has a space for typing a reply or selecting among options.
Read more »question and answer dialogue
a user interface in which the computer poses a series of questions and the user responds with answers, useful when a limited amount of information needs to be entered (as with a form) but when the series of questions may…
Read more »question-asking protocol
in contrast to the think aloud protocol, in which users are asked to speak freely about their thoughts without prompting from the tester, in the question-asking protocol, the tester explicitly asks the user questions during the user testing session, to…
Read more »questionnaire
a form that people fill out, used to obtain demographic information and views and interests of those questioned. Questionnaires are especially good for collecting subjective data (e.g. “how much do you like this software?”) and are often more convenient and…
Read more »QWERTY keyboard
the standard North American keyboard layout (pronounced KWER-TEE), named for the first 6 letters that appear along the top-left row. Primary alphabetic keys are arranged in three rows as follows:
QWERTYUIOP
ASDFGHJKL;
ZXCVBNM,./
The layout is thought to…
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