Principles of User Interface Design
Encyclopedia
The principles of user interface design are intended to improve the quality of user interface design. According to Larry Constantine
and Lucy Lockwood in their usage-centered design, these principles are:
According to Jef Raskin
in his book The Humane Interface
, there are two laws of user interface design, based on the fictional laws of robotics
created by Isaac Asimov
:
Larry Constantine
Larry LeRoy Constantine is an American software engineer and professor in the Mathematics and Engineering Department at the University of Madeira Portugal, who is considered one of the pioneers of computing...
and Lucy Lockwood in their usage-centered design, 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.
- 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
Jef Raskin was an American human-computer interface expert best known for starting the Macintosh project for Apple in the late 1970s.-Early years and education:...
in his book The Humane Interface
The Humane Interface
The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems is a book about user interface design written by Jef Raskin and published in 2000. It covers ergonomics, quantification, evaluation, and navigation.-Contents:...
, there are two laws of user interface design, based on the fictional laws of robotics
Three Laws of Robotics
The Three Laws of Robotics are a set of rules devised by the science fiction author Isaac Asimov and later added to. The rules are introduced in his 1942 short story "Runaround", although they were foreshadowed in a few earlier stories...
created by Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov was an American author and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, best known for his works of science fiction and for his popular science books. Asimov was one of the most prolific writers of all time, having written or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 90,000...
:
| 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. |