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- By Everett McKay on December 7th, 2010
- Design guidelines
Guidelines-based design—A developer’s guide to intuitive UI
Last night, I presented Guidelines-based design—A developer’s guide to intuitive UI to the Vermont.Net User Group.
Guidelines are rules, based on design principles, experience, and convention.Following guidelines will help your program communicate to users effectively, feel “intuitive”, and have a familiar, consistent appearance. The thing I like most about using guidelines is that there is no other practical way to get to a high level of quality and consistency as quickly. The traditional design process (of brainstorming, prototyping, testing, iterating) won’t do it, nor will user-centered design techniques like scenarios and personas—they just don’t address the same level of detail.
Here is the deck. Please check it out! And please contact me if you would like me to perform a Design Principle and Guideline Review of your product.
Leave a Comment / What do you think?
3 Responses
- Everett McKay - July 2, 2011 at 8:47 am #
Somebody just played the “great thing about standards is that there are so many of them” card on me. Kind of funny and kind of true. Still, here’s an interesting challenge:
Pick any well known UX topic.
Find the number of useful, relevant guidelines on the topic. (Key: there are many unuseful sets of guidelines out there–don’t bother with those.)
Post the same topic to a UX discussion group.
Count the number of useful, relevant responses on the topic.
Count the number of unuseful, irrelevant responses on the topic.
Compare the results.Sure, you might find more than one useful guideline, but my claim is that for well known UX topics, applying good guidelines will often get you to the right answer more quickly and confidently than the alternatives.
- Kayla Block - August 15, 2011 at 12:49 pm #
Nicely done slide show.
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Hey Everett — great presentation here. Wondering if you could share the group’s reaction to the deck? Any interesting conversation afterward? Always curious to see how developers/engineers respond to this stuff. Are they open, for instance, to the idea that they’ll “get it wrong?”
Interested to hear your thoughts — thanks in advance!
Best — Joe