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Golden Rules of Interface Design (2013)

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Re: Golden Rules of Interface Design (2013)

#121

Post by albert_e »

weinzierl wrote: post #116
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.

> ... first versions of V5

So "V5" is not "version five" of something?

God.

Re: Golden Rules of Interface Design (2013)

#122

Post by stronglikedan »

9. Stop popping in something else in place of what I'm just about to select, causing me to select the wrong thing! (I know this maybe violates or can be mitigated by some of the previous rules, but it is the one thing that drives me absolutely bonkers, and I consider it to be a particularly egregious mistake.)

Re: Golden Rules of Interface Design (2013)

#123

Post by asoneth »

beowulfey wrote: post #111
pprotas wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Every interface convention was novel at some point. Breaking them doesn't necessarily make a UI bad, just as following them doesn't make it good. It depends on your skill as well as your audience, their expectations, and how experienced they are with the current interface patterns.

But certainly the vast majority of products should not create new or novel interface patterns just as they shouldn't "roll their own" cryptography -- it is almost always unnecessary and unless it is your primary focus it is very likely that what you come up with will be significantly worse than the status quo.

Re: Golden Rules of Interface Design (2013)

#124

Post by andsoitis »

Nielsen's 10 usability heuristics for user interface design gives a good north star:

1. Visibility of system status

2. Match between system and the real world

3. User control and freedom

4. Consistency and standards

5. Error prevention

6. Recognition rather than recall

7. Flexibility and efficiency of use

8. Aesthetic and minimalist design

9. Recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors

10. Help and documentation

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ten-usability-heuristics/

Re: Golden Rules of Interface Design (2013)

#125

Post by eviks »

whycome wrote: post #120
eviks wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Yes, and make your now useless alpha keys into a perfectly usable numpad so you don't have to use the worse horizontal numbers row or shift your hand to the actual numpad!

uio 123

jkl 456

m,. 789

Re: Golden Rules of Interface Design (2013)

#126

Post by tech2 »

stronglikedan wrote: post #122

9. Stop popping in something else in place of what I'm just about to select, causing me to select the wrong thing! (I know this maybe violates or can be mitigated by some of the previous rules, but it is the one thing that drives me absolutely bonkers, and I consider it to be a particularly egregious mistake.)

Jira and the Unassigned/Automatic selection when trying to change a story assignment, I'm looking at YOU in particular!

Re: Golden Rules of Interface Design (2013)

#127

Post by lcuff »

andsoitis wrote: post #124

Nielsen's 10 usability heuristics for user interface design gives a good north star: 1. Visibility of system status 2. Match between system and the real world 3. User control and freedom 4. Consistency and standards 5. Error prevention 6. Recognition rather than recall 7. Flexibility and efficiency of use 8. Aesthetic and minimalist design 9. Recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors 10. Help and documentation htt…

The contrast between this Nielsen-Norman (NN) page and the OP page is marked. The NN page is much easier to absorb the information. More succinct, way better page layout.

Both articles have information/direction worth heeding, but there is irony in the fact that the OP page adopts same-text size and paragraphing conventions of yesteryear that the NN page does away with.

It's also frustrating that Hacker News doesn't pay attention to some of the information. In creating an edit to an existing post, the feedback after clicking on the 'update' button is not as clear as it should be. (It's a screen redraw, I guess).

Re: Golden Rules of Interface Design (2013)

#128

Post by KineticLensman »

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…

> Update: Read more about this in this article

I read the article (TL;DR it describes a bond car that lets Bond select a weapon only to then give him an error message saying 'ammunition not loaded', and then considers how this should be handled from a UI perspective).

Thinking about the overall UI guidelines topic, the bond article misses an obvious point - that cars already have familiar mechanisms for displaying the status of consumables such as fuel, oil and battery: gauges on the dashboard. Applying the consistency guideline, Q could have installed an ammo gauge, and the 'backfire' button would then be permanently available. After all, Bond might still wish to deploy the gun for effect, e.g. to intimidate someone, even if he knows that there isn't in fact any ammo.

Re: Golden Rules of Interface Design (2013)

#129

Post by 98789992165 »

bheadmaster wrote: post #91
threethree wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very interesting. Yeah I think bad UI could be a way to gatekeep. 4chan for example has its mostly-unchanged now old-school interface, with its own quote/reply system, which some call an IQ barrier. That plus all the lingo. It typically gives out outsiders (journalists, govt agents, new users etc)

> 4chan for example has its mostly-unchanged now old-school interface, with its own quote/reply system, which some call an IQ barrier I doubt it would be an IQ barrier, considering the apparent intelligence of many of the posters there. I would rather call it a "normie filter" - the UI is so old-school ("ugly") that "normies", who usually dwell on fancy UI sites like Facebook, Reddit, etc., will consider it lame and…

4chan - smart people acting dumb

HN - dumb people acting smart

Re: Golden Rules of Interface Design (2013)

#130

Post by nyreed »

One golden rule that I learned is that interface elements should not move unexpectedly after the interface has been drawn. Google is particularly bad for buttons which move between you lifting your thumb and pressing the screen, but they're not alone.
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