Module III

DESIGN RULES
Design Rules
Designing for maximum usability
– the goal of interaction design
Principles of usability
◦ general understanding

Standards and guidelines

◦ direction for design

Design patterns
◦ capture and reuse design knowledge
Types of Design Rules
principles
◦ abstract design rules
◦ low authority
◦ high generality

increasing generality
Guidelines
standards

increasing generality
◦ specific design rules
◦ high authority
◦ limited application Standards

guidelines
◦ lower authority
◦ more general application increasing authority
increasing authority
What is Usability?
 Usability and HCI are becoming the most important
aspects in the system development process to improve the
system facilities to satisfy the user’s requirements.
 HCI assists the designers and analysts in identifying the
system needs from text cycles, fonts, layout, graphics, color,
etc.
 Usability confirms that the system is effective, efficient,
safe, easy to learn, easy to evaluate, practically visible, and
provides job satisfaction to the users.
Principles to support usability
Learnability
The ease with which new users can begin effective
interaction and achieve maximal performance
Flexibility
The multiplicity of ways the user and system exchange
information
Robustness
The level of support provided the user in determining
successful achievement and assessment of goal-directed
behaviour
Principles of learnability
Predictability
◦ determining effect of future actions based on past interaction history
◦ operation visibility

Synthesizability
◦ assessing the effect of past actions
◦ immediate vs. eventual honesty

Familiarity
◦ how prior knowledge applies to new system
◦ Guess ability; affordance
Generalizability
◦ extending specific interaction knowledge to new situations
Consistency
◦ likeness in input/output behaviour arising from similar situations or task
objectives
 Principles of flexibility
Dialogue initiative
◦ freedom from system imposed constraints on input dialogue
◦ system vs. user pre-emptiveness
Multithreading
◦ ability of system to support user interaction for more than one task at
a time
◦ concurrent vs. interleaving; multimodality
Task migratability
◦ passing responsibility for task execution between user and system
Substitutivity
◦ allowing equivalent values of input and output to be substituted for each other
◦ representation multiplicity; equal opportunity

Customizability
◦ modifiability of the user interface by user (adaptability) or system (adaptivity)
Principles
Observability
of robustness
◦ ability of user to evaluate the internal state of the system from its
perceivable representation
◦ browsability; defaults; reachability; persistence; operation visibility

Recoverability
◦ ability of user to take corrective action once an error has been
recognized
◦ reachability; forward/backward recovery; commensurate effort
Responsiveness
◦ how the user perceives the rate of communication with the system
◦ Stability

Task conformance
◦ degree to which system services support all of the user's tasks
◦ task completeness; task adequacy
 increasing generality
Guidelines

increasing generality
Using design rules
Design rules
Standards

suggest how to increase usability

differ in generality and authority
increasing authority
increasing authority
Standards
 Set by designers national or international bodies to ensure
compliance by a large community standards require sound
underlying theory and slowly changing technology

 Hardware standards more common than software high

authority and low level of detail

 British Standards Institution (BSI), International

Organization for Standardization (ISO), ANSI, ISI, etc

 ISO 9241 defines usability as effectiveness, efficiency and

satisfaction with which users accomplish tasks
 Guidelines
 It provides detail design specifications & clear instructions
to designers & developers.
Design Guidelines follow all principles that supports
Usability.
Design Guidelines
1. Maintain internal & external consistency.
2. Guidelines should be more suggestive & general.
3. Use of familiar terms & user friendly representations.
4. Use Guidelines that resolve conflicts in design.
5. Use direct manipulation whenever possible.
6. Design should be nice without compromising the usefulness & usability
of system.
7. Abstract guidelines (principles) applicable during early life cycle
activities.
8. Detailed guidelines (style guides) applicable during later life cycle
activities.
Golden rules and heuristics
“Broad brush” design rules
Useful check list for good design
Better design using these than using nothing!
Different collections e.g.
◦ Shneiderman’s 8 Golden Rules
◦ Norman’s 7 Principles
◦ Nielsen’s 10 Heuristics
Shneiderman’s 8 Golden
Rules
1. Strive for consistency
2. Enable frequent users to use shortcuts
3. Offer informative feedback
4. Design dialogs to yield closure
5. Offer error prevention and simple error handling
6. Permit easy reversal of actions
7. Support internal locus of control
8. Reduce short-term memory load
1. Strive for consistency.
Consistent sequences of actions should be required in similar situations;
identical terminology should be used in prompts, menus, and help
screens; and consistent color, layout, capitalization, fonts, and so on,
should be employed throughout.
Exceptions, such as required confirmation of the delete command or no
echoing of passwords, should be comprehensible and limited in number
2. Enable frequent users to use shortcuts
Recognize the needs of diverse users and design for plasticity,
facilitating transformation of content. Novice to expert differences, age
ranges, disabilities, international variations, and technological diversity
each enrich the spectrum of requirements that guides design.
Adding features for novices, such as explanations, and features for
experts, such as shortcuts and faster pacing, enriches the interface
design and improves perceived quality.
3. Offer informative feedback.
For every user action, there should be an interface feedback. For
frequent and minor actions, the response can be modest, whereas for
infrequent and major actions, the response should be more substantial.
Visual presentation of the objects of interest provides a convenient
environment for showing changes explicitly.
4. Design dialogs to yield closure.
Sequences of actions should be organized into groups with a beginning,
middle, and end. Informative feedback at the completion of a group of
actions gives users the satisfaction of accomplishment, a sense of relief,
a signal to drop contingency plans from their minds, and an indicator to
prepare for the next group of actions.
For example, e-commerce websites move users from selecting products
to the checkout, ending with a clear confirmation page that completes
the transaction.
5. Prevent errors.
As much as possible, design the interface so that users cannot make serious
errors; for example, gray out menu items that are not appropriate and do not
allow alphabetic characters in numeric entry fields.
If users make an error, the interface should offer simple, constructive, and
specific instructions for recovery. For example, users should not have to retype
an entire name-address form if they enter an invalid zip code but rather should
be guided to repair only the faulty part. Erroneous actions should leave the
interface state unchanged, or the interface should give instructions about
restoring the state.
6. Permit easy reversal of actions.
As much as possible, actions should be reversible. This feature relieves anxiety,
since users know that errors can be undone, and encourages exploration of
unfamiliar options. The units of reversibility may be a single action, a data-entry
task, or a complete group of actions, such as entry of a name-address block.
7. Keep users in control.
Experienced users strongly desire the sense that they are in charge of
the interface and that the interface responds to their actions.
They don’t want surprises or changes in familiar behavior, and they are
annoyed by tedious data-entry sequences, difficulty in obtaining
necessary information, and inability to produce their desired result.
8. Reduce short-term memory load.
Humans’ limited capacity for information processing in short-term
memory (the rule of thumb is that people can remember “seven plus or
minus two chunks” of information) requires that designers avoid
interfaces in which users must remember information from one display
and then use that information on another display.
It means that cellphones should not require reentry of phone numbers,
website locations should remain visible, and lengthy forms should be
compacted to fit a single display
Norman’s 7 Principles
1. Use both knowledge in the world and knowledge in the
head.
2. Simplify the structure of tasks.
3. Make things visible: bridge the gulfs of Execution and
Evaluation.
4. Get the mappings right.
5. Exploit the power of constraints, both natural and
artificial.
6. Design for error.
7. When all else fails, standardize.
 Nielsen’s 10 Heuristics
1. Visibility of system status
2. Match between the system and the real world
3. User control and freedom
4. Consistency and standards
5. Error prevention
6. Recognition rather than recall
7. Flexibility and efficiency of use
8. Aesthetic and minimalist design
9. Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
10. Help and documentation
HCI design patterns
 An approach to reusing knowledge about successful
design solutions
 Originated in architecture: Alexander
 A pattern is an invariant solution to a recurrent problem
within a specific context.
 Examples
◦ Light on Two Sides of Every Room (architecture)
◦ Go back to a safe place (HCI)

 Patterns do not exist in isolation but are linked to other

patterns in languages which enable complete designs to be
generated
HCI design patterns (cont.)
Characteristics of patterns
◦ capture design practice not theory
◦ capture the essential common properties of good examples of design
◦ represent design knowledge at varying levels: social, organisational,
conceptual, detailed
◦ embody values and can express what is humane in interface design
◦ are intuitive and readable and can therefore be used for
communication between all stakeholders
◦ a pattern language should be generative and assist in the development
of complete designs.
Summary
Principles for usability
◦ repeatable design for usability relies on maximizing benefit of one
good design by abstracting out the general properties which can
direct purposeful design
◦ The success of designing for usability requires both creative insight
(new paradigms) and purposeful principled practice

Using design rules

◦ standards and guidelines to direct design activity