10 Things in Design You May Take For Granted
If you read this (and it must be on your electronic device), you must have used a bunch of digital product on your gadget. Most big apps have beautiful design and great experience and it’s considered normal (it’s a must actually). It’s so normal so that some people won’t notice good design decision on digital product, until they got pain while using it.
To create usable interaction design, Jakob Nielsen on January 1, 1995 create the famous “10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design”. It’s 10 most general principles for interaction design you might not notice you see it everyday on your favorite apps.
Here’s the 10 rule of thumb on interaction design with some example from our PPL project and most apps.
Visibility of system status
The system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within reasonable time.
Loading bar or spin is the best example of this. Have you ever use a program, did something and then nothing happens? You must be anxious, “is it working?, is it done?, or is it hanged?” Here’s loading state to the rescue. Loading tells you the state of the program. For program with long time process might be need loading percentage to tell user how long it will finished.
Match between system and the real world
The system should speak the users’ language, with words, phrases and concepts familiar to the user, rather than system-oriented terms. Follow real-world conventions, making information appear in a natural and logical order.
Microsoft office use floppy disk and map folder as button icon to represent save action and directory related icon because (at least at early time) floppy disk use to save data on directory is just like real map folder that stores files.
User control and freedom
Users often choose system functions by mistake and will need a clearly marked “emergency exit” to leave the unwanted state without having to go through an extended dialogue. Support undo and redo.
System should provide confirmation for risky action or simply undo button. Google mostly show undo modal after delete because it’s more effective than confirmation box.
Consistency and standards
Users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing. Follow platform conventions.
Even though you don’t know Japanese, you know that button stands for save button. Microsoft (and 99.99% of software, i guess) use floppy disk icon as save button. Even if you never know or see floppy disk in your whole lifetime, you know that it’s save icon. (Funny thing, a japanese on twitter thought this was vending machine with purchased drink at the bottom). Because that’s the standard since a long time ago and there’s no need to change that.
On our project, we use pencil icon for edit action because that was the standard and it was obvious for most people that it’s an edit button.
Error prevention
Even better than good error messages is a careful design which prevents a problem from occurring in the first place. Either eliminate error-prone conditions or check for them and present users with a confirmation option before they commit to the action.
You see this kind of dialog box when you fill in form and press back. It would be sucks if you lose your long filled form because you accidentally pressed back. So the system better handle this with confirmation box. Or even better saves your progress on form to fill in later, either you accidentally or intentionally pressed back.
Recognition rather than recall
Minimize the user’s memory load by making objects, actions, and options visible. The user should not have to remember information from one part of the dialogue to another. Instructions for use of the system should be visible or easily retrievable whenever appropriate.
On our app, we provide options on our form so that the user doesn’t need to type and recall what they need to fill in that form.
My other favorite example of this principle of this how YouTube can give user the correct music video by search its misheard lyrics. I think that’s clever and funny since sometimes people don’t remember the song’s title and only remember the lyrics that is also fuzzy.
Flexibility and efficiency of use
Accelerators — unseen by the novice user — may often speed up the interaction for the expert user such that the system can cater to both inexperienced and experienced users. Allow users to tailor frequent actions.
Photoshop and other graphic design software provides either icon tools or shortcut so that newbie can user it easily and professional can use it quickly.
Aesthetic and minimalist design
Dialogues should not contain information which is irrelevant or rarely needed. Every extra unit of information in a dialogue competes with the relevant units of information and diminishes their relative visibility.
The best example of this principle is Google Search. It’s simple. The main reason user go to this site, if not to check whether the internet is on, is to search something online, hence the search box is in the middle of wide white space.
Our app also has (kinda) aesthetic and minimalist design on its home page where everything user need on this app is one click away from the home page.
Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
Error messages should be expressed in plain language (no codes), precisely indicate the problem, and constructively suggest a solution.
Error message on form, prohibited action message, page not found message is probably the most frequent implementation of this principle. Remember when Twitter only allows 140 characters and its logo is not even bird yet? On early days, sometimes Twitter is over capacity due the large amount of active user so they show legendary error page above to users who failed to log in. It helps. User will understand the situation and keep refresh the page or wait a moment before re-login.
Help and documentation
Even though it is better if the system can be used without documentation, it may be necessary to provide help and documentation. Any such information should be easy to search, focused on the user’s task, list concrete steps to be carried out, and not be too large.
As developer, we are users too! You know well how important documentation it is. Isn’t it, right? Well at least we need clear guide how to utilize a language, library, or tools.
Other examples of good documentation and help for non-developer-user is Google Drive. They provide bunch of basic to advance tutorial to utilize the whole Google Suite. Although Google Drive is pretty intuitive, some tasks are difficult to do without the help of tutorial.
That’s all! From now on, as developer, we should make sure our product meets all of this principles. As a user, I think we should thank designer and developer out there who made beautiful and useful app that we use everyday.
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