Golden Rules of User Interface Design

Place the user in control, reduce the user's memory load, and make the interface consistent.

Interaction modes should not force users into unnecessary or undesired actions.

A design realization of the user's mental model of the system, ensuring a good fit with user expectations.

Establish meaningful defaults and provide intuitive shortcuts to reduce reliance on short-term memory.

Understanding the users, their tasks, the content they need, and the environment of system interaction.

Formal education, learning capabilities, typing skills, age range, gender, compensation, work hours, and language proficiency of the users.

Identifying work tasks, subtasks, problem domain objects, workflow, and task hierarchy.

Basic interaction, task elaboration, object elaboration, and workflow analysis.

Assigning data to consistent screen locations, customization options, clear on-screen identification, partitioning large reports, providing summary information, scaling graphical output, using color effectively, and crafting clear error messages.

Understanding the impact of user mistakes on system functionality and overall user experience.

User interface inputs and outputs, defining how the user interacts with the system.

Focus on how the system will be implemented, dealing with the underlying architecture and components.

Specifying data passing between modules, handling exceptional circumstances, and defining starting states.

Practices to ensure code quality and reliability by integrating documentation and testing throughout the coding process.

To ensure all possible paths in the code are tested, thus covering all potential execution scenarios.

Developers write the tests before the code, ensuring that unit testing is not skipped.

To re-run old tests to check for any issues introduced by recent changes to the code.

Behavior of the system under extreme load conditions to identify breaking points and performance bottlenecks.

Black-box testing uses functional specifications without knowledge of internal structure, while white-box testing uses internal structure knowledge for designing test cases.

Stub Testing uses simplified code (stubs) in place of subordinate modules, often in top-down testing.

Testing each module in isolation to find errors in its code; also known as module testing.

Bringing all program modules together for testing, usually in a top-down, incremental manner.

To ensure data is valid, sensible, and reasonable before processing, maintaining data integrity.

Data verification checks that the document meets specifications, while data validation ensures data is valid before processing.

Determining if the output of one phase of software development conforms to that of its previous phase.

Techniques like coding specific words, format checks, and spelling/grammar checks.