The Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design
I have often been asked to distill the vast corpus of user interface design into a few key principles. While I was reluctant to do this, it turned out to be a good exercise to write “Golden Rules,” that are applicable in most interactive systems. These principles, derived from experience and refined over three decades, require validation and tuning for specific design domains. No list such as this can be complete, but even the original list from 1985, has been well received as a useful guide to students and designers. Jakob Nielsen, Jeff Johnson, and others have expanded these rules and included their variations, which enriches the discussion. Each edition of the book produces some changes. This version is from Section 3.3.4 of the Sixth edition:
Shneiderman, B., Plaisant, C., Cohen, M., Jacobs, S., and Elmqvist, N., Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction: Sixth Edition, Pearson (May 2016) http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/DTUI6
- Strive for consistency. Consistent sequences of actions should be required in similar situations …
- Enable frequent users to use shortcuts. As the frequency of use increases, so do the user’s desires to reduce the number of interactions …
- Offer informative feedback. For every operator action, there should be some system feedback …
- Design dialog to yield closure. Sequences of actions should be organized into groups with a beginning, middle, and end …
- Offer simple error handling. As much as possible, design the system so the user cannot make a serious error …
- Permit easy reversal of actions. This feature relieves anxiety, since the user knows that errors can be undone …
- Support internal locus of control. Experienced operators strongly desire the sense that they are in charge of the system and that the system responds to their actions. Design the system to make users the initiators of actions rather than the responders.
- Reduce short-term memory load. The limitation of human information processing in short-term memory requires that displays be kept simple, multiple page displays be consolidated, window-motion frequency be reduced, and sufficient training time be allotted for codes, mnemonics, and sequences of actions.
Source The Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design
Other references
How to use Ben Shneiderman’s golden rules in your design
Shneiderman’s Eight Golden Rules Will Help You Design Better Interfaces