71–80 of 173 posts
Although not really part of a UI's "design", performance is often overlooked as well. A poorly performing UI violates every single one of these design rules. My sony android smart TV looks amazing but the UI is so slow as to be unusable. An unstable UI that is always changing also violates most of these principles. Smart TVs seem to be exceptionally bad in this area too, with the home screen layout and app icons freq…
Not sure that Strive for Consistency should be a golden rule of all interface design. Software maybe. But the reality is the world is inconsistent and humans mental model of tasks are inconsistent. Sometimes its better to design an interface that conforms to the world or the mental model. As a random example: You could have an interface on a car that is almost entirely touch screens. You might see replacing the steer…
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Annoying as shit. If I'm trying to log into something with an E-mail address (already a fail, but that's another topic) and password, and I click "forgot password," don't take me to a form where I have to re-enter the goddamned E-mail address I JUST ENTERED.
Or its twin cousin: forcing me to login after updating my password.
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I agree with the importance of consistency, but disagree with "Office and (Neo)Vim aren’t exceptional examples of UI, but they are uniquely stable." Office is not stable, at least over the long term. The hated "ribbon" marked a sad departure from the "stable" and efficient Word UI, and Microsoft's clueless regressions across the Windows platform have compounded the problem. For example, the deletion of the menu bar f…
We are about a year or 2 from the Ribbon interface existing in Office longer than the pre-Ribbon interface. I will agree that the Ribbon and what you can customize or use in it/looks has changed drastically since 2007. But the Ribbon “paradigm” will soon have existed longer than the non-Ribbon “stable and efficient” interface so it is more “stable” in one way.
"For example, users should not have to retype an entire name-address form if they enter an invalid zip code but rather should be guided to repair only the faulty part." This is my biggest pet peeve, and I still see it. It should also be true for multi-page forms if you are going back and forth between form pages. "Erroneous actions should leave the interface state unchanged, or the interface should give instructions…
Some good stuff here, but generally I’d disagree with: > Prevent errors: As much as possible, design the interface so that users cannot make serious errors; for example, gray out menu items that are not appropriate and do not allow alphabetic characters in numeric entry fields (Section 3.3.5 This sounds nice in theory, but in practice too many guardrails like this will just confuse users. “Why can’t I type text here?…
Add a tooltip on disabled inputs.
Good UIs still use tooltips, you just have to click or drag when in touch mode.
There's also the awkward problem of most native tooltips being plain-text-only, when text is not actually sufficient for every problem (such as international text). And emulated "tooltip" widgets are slow, buggy, etc.
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I still hate ribbons. MS Office UI peeked around versions 97-2003 or so. Everything in a menu, actions grouped / categorized so they were easier to discover. QUICKLY accessible by underlined keyboard combinations (alt+menu letter THEN item in menu letter) and with any actions that had a direct keyboard shortcut annotated. Everything easily discoverable. Ribbons, I've no idea how the categorize what's popular or not,…
You can still access the items in the ribbons with Alt key sequences (although I agree that they've become far less discoverable), but the full-screen(!) "file menu" abomination that they added in later versions is even more hostile and offensive.