Principles of interaction design

Hoekman’s guidelines:

• Justify the functionality (see page 192 of Designing the moment book: Weather widgets on government sites don’t make sense).
• Use instructive design to get users up to speed
• Maintain consistency from one screen to the next  (for learnability)
• Leverage design patterns to make interactions more learnable and repeatable
• Cater for each stage in the interaction: invitation, manipulation, completion (each needs simple and clear feedback)

Also from his book Designing the moment:

• Build only what’s absolutely necessary.
• Quickly turn beginning users into intermediates.
• Prevent errors whenever possible and handle the errors we cannot prevent gracefully.
• Reduce and refine interactions and task flows until even the most complicated applications are clear and understandable.
• Design to support a specific activity.
• Make constant, incremental improvements to your processes and applications.
• Ignore the demands of users and stick to a vision. (debatable)

The book About Face 3  is full of useful principles.

• On innovating: only break convention if doing so adds value.

Laws of simplicity book:

• Reduce
• Group
• Hide
• …

Dan Saffer wrote on how to achieve simplicity:

• Remove features. The more features you have, the more complexity you have.
• Hide features. Use menus, tabs, dropdowns, etc. to make features available, but not seen until needed.
• Organize features. Cluster like features, content, and controls together under a single area (which can be hidden).
• Tightly align the user’s mental model with the product’s conceptual model. The closer you get, the simpler it will seem.
• Make every choice visible. Rather than hiding all choices under a dropdown, for instance, show them all.
• Conversely, hide some choices if there are too many to be reasonably scanned.
• Reduce choice. Take away customization and limit choices to the most often used.
• Smart defaults. Have them. Make them visible.
• Shortcuts. Make shortcuts to the most used actions in the product.
• Distribute functionality to the right platform. Decide where functionality should logically be located: device, desktop, web. Don’t cram everything onto one platform unless it makes sense to do so.

Random laws:

• Remove stuff till the design breaks.
• If novices can use it, chances are intermediates and expert users will quickly also find what they’re looking for.
• Links are for navigation, buttons are for actions

UI specific laws

• When to use radiobuttons versus dropdowns versus link lists versus …

More reading

http://shortboredsurfer.com/2010/08/11-principles-of-interaction-design-explained/

Related posts

Laws of interaction design
Interaction designer’s neccesities

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