7. Design principles & guidelines Flashcards
What are Interaction design principles and guidelines?
Interaction design principles and guidelines offer prescriptive advice to inform best practice
There are many sets of principles and guidelines available. Need to consult right ones
How can we use interaction design principles? (2)
Best practice - Guide designers’ decisions when creating interfaces and interactive systems
Evaluation - Can be used to evaluate the usability of systems
What are Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Heuristics?
Visibility of system status
Match between system and the real world
User control and freedom
Consistency and standards
Error prevention
Recognition rather than recall
Flexibility and efficiency of use
Aesthetic and minimalist design
Help users recognise, diagnose, and recover from errors
Help and documentation
What are Don Norman’s 7 Design Principles?
Discoverability - Can users clearly see and understand the available options and controls?
Feedback - Do users receive immediate and clear information about what actions have been performed and the current state?
Conceptual Model - Can users form a good understanding of how the system operates, based on its design?
Affordance - Do appropriate means for interaction exist and are they supported by design?
Signifiers - Are there effective cues to ensure discoverability and communicate feedback clearly?
Mappings - Do the controls and their movements intuitively correspond to their real world effects?
Constraints - Are users guided to the correct actions and prevented from making errors?
What are Ben Shneiderman’s 8 golden rules of interface design?
Strive for consistency.
Seek universal usability.
Offer informative feedback.
Design dialogs to yield closure.
Prevent errors.
Permit easy reversal of actions.
Keep users in control.
Reduce short-term memory load.
What are the CRAP visual design principles?
Contrast - Ensure good contrast between what you want people to pay
attention to and other noise around it.
Repetition - Ensure consistency by repeating the same style, imagery and icons across the design.
Alignment - Make sure everything (text, images etc) is aligned and organised to provide visual structure
Proximity - Group elements which
are related to each other (and put elements not related away
from each other)
What are “design guidelines”?
Specific applications of principles to particular situations
Often provided by software/ hardware providers
Do not explain how to program interfaces but how they should look or behave
What are “design patterns”?
Documented solutions for regularly faced design problems
They save from having to solve something that has already been solved
They can be adapted to solve specific design problems
What are “design systems”?
Design systems are a collection of reusable elements, patterns, components, styles and standards that help maintain visual consistency across a digital product
What’s the relationship between cognitive psychology and design principles and guidelines?
Some principles and guidelines are informed by cognitive psychology – what we know about how humans perceive, think and learn as human abilities and limitations have great implications on for interaction design
