A year after our first usability study of iPad apps, it's nice to see that iPad user interfaces have become decidedly less wacky. It's even better to see good uptake of several of our recommendations from last year, including apps with:
- back buttons,
- broader use of search,
- homepages, and
- direct access to articles by touching headlines on the front page.
Dr. Nielsen founded the "discount usability engineering" movement for fast and cheap improvements of user interfaces and has invented several usability methods, including heuristic evaluation. He holds 79 United States patents, mainly on ways of making the Internet easier to use.Source: http://www.useit.com/jakob/
Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design
As a result of Interface Design Studies, Ben Shneiderman proposed a collection of principles that are derived heuristically from experience and applicable in most interactive systems. These principles are common for user interface design, and as such also for web design.
- Strive for consistency.
- Enable frequent users to use shortcuts.
- Offer informative feedback.
- Design dialog to yield closure.
- Offer simple error handling.
- Permit easy reversal of actions.
- Provide the sense of control. Support internal locus of control.
- Reduce short-term memory load.