zondag 5 augustus 2018

Chapter 1: The most important UI design rules

What are the most important User Interface design rules?
Online you can find a lot of Interaction design guides, and you can find a lot of different rules
and guidelines that you can use when designing. But which rules are the most important and
which ones are most commonly used?

Before we can examine and judge our own User Interface design, we will have to know what rules we are

going to need to apply to it. You can find a lot of Interaction design guides online, but every guide is just a little
bit different. One guide can have ten rules and guidelines, while the next one can have around five.
So which ones are the most important and most commonly used? To find out we are going
to have a look at three different guides. In these different guides we are going to look for similar design rules.
With all the similar rules we can find, we will make a top five rule list. With this list, we will have a good overview
of the most commonly used design rules, that we can eventually apply to our own User Interface design.


I have had a look at three good Interaction design guides online for you guys, the first one being the
User Interface Design Guidelines: 10 Rules of thumb. The second one is Shneiderman’s Eight golden rules
will help you design better interfaces. And the Human- Computer Interaction. These guides were very interesting,
but also very different from each other. But while they had their differences, they also had similarities.
Each one of the guides can be broken down into a couple of principles. Nielsen’s, Molich’s and Shneiderman’s
design rules can be broken down into seven principles.  
                       
Efficiency: How quickly can users perform tasks?
Memorability: If a user hasn’t visited the system in a while, how well will they remember the interface?
Errors: How many errors do users make, and how quickly can they recover from errors?
Satisfaction: Do users enjoy using the interface, and are they pleased with the results?
And in the book Human-Computer Interaction, usability is broken down into three principles:
Learnability: How easily can a new user navigate the interface?
Flexibility: How many ways can the user interact with the system?
And Robustness: How well are we supporting users when they face errors.

In these articles I have noticed the similarities between principles. The principles from Nielsen,
Molich and Shneiderman are pretty much similar. The principles from the Human-Computer interaction
are pretty much similar with the principles from Nielsen,Molich and Shneiderman’s. I would say that these
articles, are a reliable source of information. Nielsen, Molich and Shneiderman are professionals in the
industry and know what they are talking about. They have a have a good way of passing on the knowledge.
With this information I have made a top five important Interaction design rules, that we shall use in this research
and apply to my own User Interface design.

The five most important interaction design rules we will be using are:

Learnability: How easily can a new user navigate the interface?
Efficiency: How quickly can users perform tasks?
Memorability: If a user hasn’t visited the system in a while, how well will they remember the interface?
Errors: How many errors do users make, and how quickly can they recover from errors?
Satisfaction: Do users enjoy using the interface, and are they pleased with the results?


These are the guidelines and rules we will be working with during this tutorial. We shall apply these rules to a
User Interaction design that I have already made. Or you can apply these design rules to your own User Interface.

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Introduction

Overview What are the most important Interface design rules and how do we test a User Interface that is designed by and for aliens, but is ...