Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Golden Rules of Interface Design (2013)

cs.umd.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 173 posts

Re: Golden Rules of Interface Design (2013)

#111

Post by beowulfey »

pprotas wrote: post #92
godzillabrennus wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ever since Snapchat exploded in popularity I’ve decided bad UI is a gen z feature. They flock to difficult to use interfaces that become an insider feature for young folks to keep their parents out.

Interesting, after reading your comment I've decided bad UI is subjective. I'm gen z, and never found Snapchat's UI to be confusing, and none of my gen z friends have ever complained about it, either. > They flock to difficult to use interfaces that become an insider feature for young folks to keep their parents out. This part might be true on a subconscious level (or it might be part of Snapchat's design philosophy)…

Bad UI is just one that breaks the patterns we're used to. If you're young and learning fresh patterns it doesn't matter as much

Re: Golden Rules of Interface Design (2013)

#112

Post by carlosjobim »

euroderf wrote: post #93
breadwinner wrote: post #27

> gray out menu items that are not appropriate Don't do this unless it is obvious why it is grayed out. Commands should be left enabled, then an error message should be displayed when the command is clicked and the command is unavailable, and in this case explain why it is presently unavailable. It is frustrating to the user to figure out why a command is disabled. The only time to not leave commands enabled is if th…

> Commands should be left enabled, then an error message should be displayed when the command is clicked and the command is unavailable, and in this case explain why it is presently unavailable. An exception to this: premium (for-pay) features. There is a certain To-Do app that does this. Premium commands are visually indistinguishable from freemium commands, so they get clicked a lot and they interrupt the entire ex…

It's not an error, it's deliberate.

Re: Golden Rules of Interface Design (2013)

#113

Post by rubidium »

esafak wrote: post #71
bithive123 wrote: post #31

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…

Hardware companies aren't known for their UX chops.

UX started with hardware, it was just called human factors. And most of what they came up with then gets forgotten today.

Re: Golden Rules of Interface Design (2013)

#114

Post by troupo »

mjevans wrote: post #51
Angostura wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possibly one of the reasons why so many people were bent out of shape when MS introduced the adaptive ribbon shenanigans that tried to 'help' by only showing the most likely options. Really knocked my ability to find stuff

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,…

Ribbons for Word used to have actual research behind them. Since then it's just cargo culting.

Sadly, many images are broken, but the blog series "Why The New UI" survives on web archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20080316101025/http://blogs.msdn...

Re: Golden Rules of Interface Design (2013)

#115

Post by troupo »

ShadowBanThis01 wrote: post #32
graypegg wrote: post #7

A designer I worked with years ago had a great explanation for why consistency is important. It’s not about a limited colour palette or a careful selection of fonts no one will ever notice. Chasing the specifics makes horrible software. Some people equate less diversity in their UI to more consistency. It’s about letting someone become an expert in your software. Microsoft office was always his example. People pride…

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…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38925695

Re: Golden Rules of Interface Design (2013)

#116

Post by weinzierl »

bithive123 wrote: post #31

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…

"unlabeled icons (often without even tooltips)"

The worst software I worked with in this regard was CATIA V5. It had not only hundreds of little icons in the UI, but they were also used in the documentation. The manual regularly said things like "Todo X first click [], then [] and finally go to [] to do []."

This is from the very first versions of V5, so many years ago, and hopefully has improved.

Re: Golden Rules of Interface Design (2013)

#117

Post by weinzierl »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #38
bithive123 wrote: post #31

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…

Ever since Snapchat exploded in popularity I’ve decided bad UI is a gen z feature. They flock to difficult to use interfaces that become an insider feature for young folks to keep their parents out.

One could say the same thing about the command line and software like vim being made to keep the youngsters out.

Re: Golden Rules of Interface Design (2013)

#118

Post by breadwinner »

moring wrote: post #106
breadwinner wrote: post #27

> gray out menu items that are not appropriate Don't do this unless it is obvious why it is grayed out. Commands should be left enabled, then an error message should be displayed when the command is clicked and the command is unavailable, and in this case explain why it is presently unavailable. It is frustrating to the user to figure out why a command is disabled. The only time to not leave commands enabled is if th…

> Don't do this unless it is obvious why it is grayed out. Commands should be left enabled, then an error message should be displayed when the command is clicked and the command is unavailable, and in this case explain why it is presently unavailable. Why not grey out these menu items, but still show the exact same message when you click them? That seems to be the best of both worlds to me.

Because users are accustomed to grayed out items not responding to mouse clicks, so they will never click it.

Re: Golden Rules of Interface Design (2013)

#119

Post by whycome »

guardian5x wrote: post #100

I would like to add: "Live up to expectations" in a sense that there are so many Websites or UIs there, that most users have some sort of expectations, on where to find the menu, how to go back etc. How this and that buttons should behave. Even though, you might have a great idea, it might just confuse the user, if it is totally different than what the "standard" is.

Everyone wants to create new expectations and hope they become the new standard

Re: Golden Rules of Interface Design (2013)

#120

Post by whycome »

eviks wrote: post #99
infotainment wrote: post #6

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?…

> will just confuse users. “Why can’t I type text here??” It’s often better to allow mistakes but also offer immediate explanatory feedback if something is incorrect. No, it's better to prevent a mistake and offer immediate explanatory feedback why something is incorrect. For example, the answer to "why can't I type text here??" would be a message explaining that no text is allowed, only numbers.

Or, as is possible on mobile, make the input mode change to numbers-only
Post reply on HN