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Easily digestible UI tips for developers

Asked 2008-11-12T18:41:33.280
20

What are some key UI design tips that every developer should know?

While there are a number of UI resources for developers (for example, Joel Spolsky's User Interface Design for Programmers), I'm interested in more of a bullet list that can be communicated in 1 to 2 pages.

I'm interested in more tactical, day-to-day UI tips, as opposed to overarching UI design goals that would be covered in a UI design meeting (presumably attended by at least one person with a good UI sense). A collection of these tips might cover about 80% of the cases that an everyday programmer would come across.

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11

When you are about to perform an action that will change or delete information, don't ask 'are you sure' - users will learn to click the button as part of the action. Try to allow for an 'Undo' in the system design.

answered 2008-11-12T18:48:01.677
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My basic rule of UI design is to have each "page" do one task and one task only. It keeps pages simple, which keeps design clean and makes the application more understandable.

This type of design is called Inductive User Interface. Here is a document that Microsoft put out in 2001 on the topic. The text may be a little dated, but the principles are generally pretty good. The only caveat is that there is a balance to be found in designing like this. If you oversimplify too much users will have to navigate all over the place to accomplish simple tasks, and the gains in understandability will be lost to underproductivity.

answered 2008-11-24T14:54:42.697

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