Design Principles

• Another way of conceptualizing usability is in terms of design

principles.
• These are generalizable abstractions intended to orient
designers towards thinking about different aspects of their
designs.
• More specifically, they are intended to help designers explain
and improve the design.
• However, they are not intended to specify how to design an
actual interface
– (e.g., telling the designer how to design a particular icon or how to
structure a web portal)
• The best known design principles concerned with how to
determine what users should see and do when carrying out
their tasks using an interactive product.
 Design Principles by Don Norman
• Visibility
• Feedback
• Constraints
• Mapping
• Consistency
• Affordance
 Design Principles by Don Norman (Contd.)
• Visibility:
– The more visible functions are, the more likely users will
be able to know what to do next. In contrast, when
functions are "out of sight," it makes them more difficult
to find and know how to use.
• Feedback:
– Related to the concept of visibility is feedback.
– Feedback is about sending back information about what
action has been done and what has been accomplished,
allowing the person to continue with the activity. Various
kinds of feedback are available for interaction design:
• audio, tactile, verbal, visual, and combinations of these.
Deciding which combinations are appropriate for different
kinds of activities and interactivities is central.
– Using feedback in the right way can also provide the
 Design Principles by Don Norman (Contd.)
• Constraints:
– The design concept of constraining refers to determining
ways of restricting the kind of user interaction that can
take place at a given moment.
– A common design practice in graphical user interfaces is
to deactivate certain menu options by shading them,
thereby restricting the user to only actions permissible at
that stage of the activity.
– One of the advantages of this form of constraining is it
prevents the user from selecting incorrect options and
thereby reduces the chance of making a mistake.
 Design Principles by Don Norman (Contd.)
• Constraints (Contd.):
– Norman (1999) classifies constraints into three categories:
• Physical: refer to the way physical objects restrict the
movement of things.
– For example, the way an external disk can be placed into a
disk drive is physically constrained by its shape and size, so
that it can be inserted in only one way.
• Logical: rely on people's understanding of the way the world
works. They rely on people's common-sense reasoning
about actions and their consequences. Making actions and
their effects obvious enables people to logically deduce
what further actions are required.
– Disabling menu options when not appropriate for the task in hand
provides logical constraining. It allows users to reason why (or why
not) they have been designed this way and what options are
available.
Design Principles by Don Norman (Contd.)
• Constraints (Contd.):
• Cultural: Cultural constraints rely on learned conventions.
They have to be learned. Once learned and accepted by a
cultural group, they become universally accepted
conventions.
– Two universally accepted interface conventions are the use of
windowing for displaying information and the use of icons on the
desktop to represent operations and documents.
– like the use of red for warning, the use of certain kinds of audio
signals for danger, and the use of the smiley face to represent happy
emotions.
 Design Principles by Don Norman (Contd.)
• Mapping:
– This refers to the relationship between controls and their
effects in the world.
– Nearly all artifacts need some kind of mapping between
controls and effects, whether it is a flashlight, car, power
plant, or cockpit.
• An example of a good mapping between control and effect is the
up and down arrows used to represent the up and down
movement of the cursor, respectively, on a computer keyboard.
– Mapping of the relative position of controls and their
effects is also important.
Design Principles by Don Norman (Contd.)
• Consistency:
– This refers to designing interfaces to have similar
operations and use similar elements for achieving similar
tasks. In particular, a consistent interface is one that
follows rules, such as using the same operation to select
all objects.
• For example, a consistent operation is using the same input
action to highlight any graphical object at the interface, such as
always clicking the left mouse button.
– One of the benefits of consistent interfaces, therefore, is
that they are easier to learn and use.
 Design Principles by Don Norman (Contd.)
• Affordance:
– Refer to an attribute of an object that allows people to
know how to use it.
– At a very simple level, to afford means "to give a clue"
– There are two kinds of affordance:
• Perceived: user interfaces that are screen-based are virtual and do
not have these kinds of real affordances.
• Real: Physical objects are said to have real affordances, like
grasping, that are perceptually obvious and do not have to be
learned.
 Design Principles by Don Norman (Contd.)
• Affordance (Contd.):
– It does not make sense to try to design for real affordances
at the interface except when designing physical devices,
like control consoles, where affordances like pulling and
pressing are helpful in guiding the user to know what to
do.
– Alternatively, screen-based interfaces are better
conceptualized as perceived affordances, which are
essentially learned conventions.
– In conclusion, Norman argues that other design concepts:
conventions, feedback and cultural and logical constraints-
are far more useful for helping designers develop graphical
user interfaces.
 Heuristics and usability principles
• When design principles are used in practice they are
commonly referred to as heuristics.
• This term emphasizes that something has to be done with
them when they are applied to a given problem.
• Another form of guidance is usability principles. These are
quite similar to design principles, except that they tend to be
more prescriptive.
• In addition, whereas design principles tend to be used mainly
for informing a design, usability principles are used mostly as
the basis for evaluating prototypes and existing systems.
• In particular, they provide the framework for heuristic
evaluation.
• They, too, are called heuristics when used as part of
evaluation.
 Heuristics and usability principles - usability principles
developed by Nielsen (2001)

1. Visibility of system status: always keep users informed about

what is going on, through providing appropriate feedback
within reasonable time
2. Match between system and the real world: speak the users'
language, using words, phrases and concepts familiar to the
user, rather than system oriented terms
3. User control and freedom: provide ways of allowing users
to easily escape from places they unexpectedly find
themselves, by using clearly marked 'emergency exits'
4. Consistency and standards: avoid making users wonder
whether different words, situations, or actions mean the
same thing
5. Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors:
use plain language to describe the nature of the problem
and suggest a way of solving it
 Heuristics and usability principles - usability principles
developed by Nielsen (Contd.)

6. Error prevention: where possible prevent errors occurring in

the first place
7. Recognition rather than recall: make objects, actions, and
options visible
8. Flexibility and efficiency of use: provide accelerators that
are invisible to novice users, but allow more experienced
users to carry out tasks more quickly
9. Aesthetic and minimalist design: avoid using information
that is irrelevant or rarely needed
10. Help and documentation: provide information that can be
easily searched and provides help in a set of concrete steps
that can easily be followed
 Shneiderman’s Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design

1. Strive for consistency in action sequences, layout,

terminology, command use and so on.
2. Enable frequent users to use shortcuts, such as
abbreviations, special key sequences and macros, to
perform regular, familiar actions more quickly.
3. Offer informative feedback for every user action, at a level
appropriate to the magnitude of the action.
4. Design dialogs to yield closure so that the user knows when
they have completed a task.
 Shneiderman’s Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design

5. Offer error prevention and simple error handling so that,

ideally, users are prevented from making mistakes and, if
they do, they are offered clear and informative instructions
to enable them to recover.
6. Permit easy reversal of actions in order to relieve anxiety
and encourage exploration, since the user knows that he
can always return to the previous state.
7. Support internal locus of control so that the user is in
control of the system, which responds to his actions.
8. Reduce short-term memory load by keeping displays
simple, consolidating multiple page displays and providing
time for learning action sequences.