The principles of user interface design are intended to improve the quality of user interface design. According to Lucy Lockwood's approach of
usage-centered design
Usage-centered design is an approach to user interface design based on a focus on user intentions and usage patterns. It analyzes users in terms of the roles they play in relation to systems and employs abstract (essential) use cases for task ...
, these principles are:
* ''The structure principle'': Design should organize the user interface purposefully, in meaningful and useful ways based on clear, consistent models that are apparent and recognizable to users, putting related things together and separating unrelated things, differentiating dissimilar things and making similar things resemble one another. The structure principle is concerned with overall user interface architecture.
* ''The simplicity principle'': The design should make simple, common tasks easy, communicating clearly and simply in the user's own language, and providing good shortcuts that are meaningfully related to longer procedures.
* ''The visibility principle'': The design should make all needed options and materials for a given task visible without distracting the user with extraneous or redundant information. Good designs don't overwhelm users with alternatives or confuse with unneeded information.
* ''The feedback principle'': The design should keep users informed of actions or interpretations, changes of state or condition, and errors or exceptions that are relevant and of interest to the user through clear, concise, and unambiguous language familiar to users.
* ''The tolerance principle'': The design should be flexible and tolerant, reducing the cost of mistakes and misuse by allowing undoing and redoing, while also preventing errors wherever possible by tolerating varied inputs and sequences and by interpreting all reasonable actions reasonable.
* ''The reuse principle'': The design should reuse internal and external components and behaviors, maintaining consistency with purpose rather than merely arbitrary consistency, thus reducing the need for users to rethink and remember.
According to
Jef Raskin
Jef Raskin (born Jeff Raskin; March 9, 1943 – February 26, 2005) was an American human–computer interface expert who conceived and began leading the Macintosh project at Apple in the late 1970s.
Early life and education
Jef Raskin was bo ...
there are two laws of user interface design:
* ''First Law'': A computer shall not harm your work or, through inactivity, allow your work to come to harm.
* ''Second Law'': A computer shall not waste your time or require you to do more work than is strictly necessary.
Additionally he mentions that "users should set the pace of an interaction", meaning that a user should not be kept waiting unnecessarily and that an interface should be monotonous with no surprises "the principle of monotony".
See also
*
Mental model
A mental model is an internal representation of external reality: that is, a way of representing reality within one's mind. Such models are hypothesized to play a major role in cognition, reasoning and decision-making. The term for this concept wa ...
*
The Design of Everyday Things
''The Design of Everyday Things'' is a best-selling book by cognitive scientist and usability engineer Donald Norman. Originally published in 1988 with the title ''The Psychology of Everyday Things'', it is often referred to by the initialisms ' ...
References
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Design
A design is the concept or proposal for an object, process, or system. The word ''design'' refers to something that is or has been intentionally created by a thinking agent, and is sometimes used to refer to the inherent nature of something ...
Graphic design