Master the Art of Good UI Design

Guidelines for Good User Interface Design

• Nielsen and Molich's 10 guidelines for good UI design include visibility of system status, matching the system to 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 with error recognition and recovery, and providing easy-to-access documentation.
• The "4 E's" of good UI design are easy to use, easy to understand, error-free, and effective for the end-goal.
• The Golden Rule of Design is to understand the product, as well as the limitations, capacities, tools, and platforms of computers, and the psychological, social, and human error aspects of people.
• A central concern of interaction design is to develop interactive products that are usable, easy to learn, effective to use, and provide an enjoyable user experience.
• The factors that make up a good design include the right usage of control elements, proper layout of controls and elements, striving for consistency, enabling frequent users to use shortcuts, offering informative feedback, designing dialog to yield closure, offering simple error handling, and permitting easy reversal of actions.
• Choosing the right control for a specific window/screen that will perform a specific function takes an integral part of making up a good design.
• Having a properly layout window/screen is a good practice to promote effective HCI.
• Designing "consistent interfaces" means using the same design patterns and sequences of actions for similar situations.
• Users will benefit from shortcuts, especially if they need to complete the same tasks often.
• Feedback needs to be meaningful, relevant, clear, and fit the context.
• Sequences of actions need to have a beginning, middle, and end, with informative feedback and well-defined options for the next step.
• The system needs to make it easy for the user to understand the issue and know how to solve it, with clear error notifications and descriptive hints.