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Classic advice on usability which has stood the test of time.
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Classic advice on usability which has stood the test of time.
Much has been written on usability, of information and of interfaces.1
In 1997 Arnold Lund2 surveyed a number of usability experts, asking them to assess the guidelines they found most useful in practice. His paper remains a classic, even though a lot has happened since then – he was writing just as the internet was emerging.
The full set comprises 34 guidelines, but the list below just includes the ones about which they agreed the most (and a couple that I just like, such as the last one).
I’ve left out some which seem to overlap, and some which only apply to interfaces (for example, on products) rather than information.
Know thy user, and you are not thy user
Things that look the same should act the same
The information for the decision needs to be
there when the decision is needed
Everyone makes mistakes, so every mistake
should be fixable
Don’t overload the user’s buffers
Keep it simple
Eliminate unnecessary decisions and illuminate
the rest
The user should always know what is happening
The user should be able to do what the user
wants to do
The best journey is the one with the fewest steps
You should always know how to find out
what to do next.
Even experts are novices at some point.
Provide help.
Design for regular people and the real world.
The user should be in a good mood when done.
Lund warns that guidelines do not replace expert training. One of the experts he consulted told him that
...they had seen examples in which people without expertise applied maxims inappropriately and the overall design was worse than if no maxims at all had been applied. This is probably similar to the case of a novice chess player slavishly applying an expert’s strategy even when the circumstances of the game have changed.
1. A great, authoritative source is the Neilsen Norman group: https://www.nngroup.com
2. Arnold M Lund (1997) Expert ratings of usability maxims Ergonomics in Design: The Quarterly of Human Factors Applications 5(3):15-20