20 August, 2008 9:09 pm

8 Golden Rules of Interface Design

Posted by Richard Wong under Design, Development

Considering the only way users can communicate with your application is through the interface, interface design then should be one of the most important part of any application. A good interface will enhance the experience, usability, effectiveness or even success of your system.

From the book Designing the User Interface by Ben Shneiderman, he pointed out 8 rules to guide us to good interaction design.

1. Strive for consistency.
Consistent sequences of actions should be required in similar situations; identical terminology should be used in prompts, menus, and help screens; and consistent commands should be employed throughout.
2 Enable frequent users to use shortcuts.
As the frequency of use increases, so do the user’s desires to reduce the number of interactions and to increase the pace of interaction. Abbreviations, function keys, hidden commands, and macro facilities are very helpful to an expert user.

3 Offer informative feedback.
For every operator action, there should be some system feedback. For frequent and minor actions, the response can be modest, while for infrequent and major actions, the response should be more substantial.

4 Design dialog to yield closure.
Sequences of actions should be organized into groups with a beginning, middle, and end. The informative feedback at the completion of a group of actions gives the operators the satisfaction of accomplishment, a sense of relief, the signal to drop contingency plans and options from their minds, and an indication that the way is clear to prepare for the next group of actions.

5 Offer simple error handling.
As much as possible, design the system so the user cannot make a serious error. If an error is made, the system should be able to detect the error and offer simple, comprehensible mechanisms for handling the error.

6 Permit easy reversal of actions.
This feature relieves anxiety, since the user knows that errors can be undone; it thus encourages exploration of unfamiliar options. The units of reversibility may be a single action, a data entry, or a complete group of actions.

7 Support internal locus of control.
Experienced operators strongly desire the sense that they are in charge of the system and that the system responds to their actions. Design the system to make users the initiators of actions rather than the responders.

8 Reduce short-term memory load.
The limitation of human information processing in short-term memory requires that displays be kept simple, multiple page displays be consolidated, window-motion frequency be reduced, and sufficient training time be allotted for codes, mnemonics, and sequences of actions.

I think it does not matter whether you are developing for the web or desktop. These rules should always help when making any design decision. But as web applications are becoming more and more interactive and complex, we need to make sure the experience of them are improving and not degrading.

Source from Wikipedia

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Comments

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  1. MikeWhoBikes

    Thanks for sharing this, Richard. These all seem like common sense but of course that doesn’t necessarily make them common practise now does it?

    August 26th, 2008 at 4:58 am | Link

  2. Bernhard H.

    Alltough you seem to know pretty much about interface design your comment area down here is definitely confusing. It reads “One Comments” and then there’s a single short comment in a huge form. Put together in a grew box the comment seems like a standard terms of use etc. field and is therefore first supposed to be part of the form.

    August 26th, 2008 at 9:41 am | Link

  3. Stimul8d

    Nice to see an article going back to the roots of usability. Schneiderman’s 8 golden rules are usability 101 and all designers should know them inside out but very few have ever heard the name. Shame.

    August 26th, 2008 at 9:49 am | Link

  4. gwawr

    #9… Don’t render your entire interface in italic.

    Perhaps?

    August 26th, 2008 at 12:10 pm | Link

  5. gwawr

    cancel that. I do believe it’s a local issue with Helvetica Neue of all things!

    Nice :/

    August 26th, 2008 at 12:26 pm | Link

  6. Tara Cultis

    I have the same problem with bold italics. I thought it was a trend, lol.

    #10 Visual Hierarchy - In this article, for instance, it would be nice if the “8 Reduce short-term memory load.” was bigger and a different colour than the body copy following it, so the user can easily scan the text and pick out the headlines.

    Unless of course you did that and Helvetica Neue is disguising it on us!

    August 26th, 2008 at 5:51 pm | Link

  7. Richard Wong

    Thx for your comments about “Visual Hierarchy”. I’ll definitely be more careful next time.

    Also I will try sort out this “bold italics” Helvetica Neue issue. May be by using a more standard font?

    August 26th, 2008 at 8:34 pm | Link

  8. Gino Cantu

    4cjeg7ii21wpo6u8

    November 12th, 2008 at 9:44 pm | Link

  9. james

    Very happy to see that you have tried to explain the Schneiderman’s 8 golden rules,could you please try to offer some reference website where a particular rule among the 8 ones has not been fufilled?
    Thank you

    December 16th, 2008 at 7:33 am | Link

  10. Lorrie Wiley

    hi
    fyzs0g27bjei6nfr
    good luck

    January 10th, 2009 at 2:18 am | Link

  11. elikeDreavase

    Отлично,несогласен с предыдущими ораторами
    Споки Bye

    June 14th, 2009 at 10:11 am | Link

  12. Wolf48

    These are instruments or tests that are approved by educators, psychologists, or others who are familiar with the type of disability your child has. ,

    October 22nd, 2009 at 5:38 pm | Link

  13. His_wife91

    Indeed, there are wars over land and wars over resources, and this, the United States knows well, for over the course of its history it has initiated many of them, and most of the wars over land and resources over the past 60 years have been planned at the Pentagon. ,

    October 23rd, 2009 at 2:44 pm | Link

  14. rambha

    what is locus of control it was mention in rule 7
    it should be focus on control

    December 1st, 2009 at 10:43 am | Link

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