golden rules and heuristics

Notes

Study Notes

HCI Notes: Golden Rules and Heuristics

Design Principles: Golden Rules and Heuristics

Foundational sets of abstract rules for evaluating and guiding interactive system design.

1. Defining Design Rules

These terms are often used interchangeably, but generally represent guidelines that are more abstract than **Standards** (mandatory) and less specific than **Guidelines** (detailed, platform-specific advice).

  • **Principles (Golden Rules):** Broad, theory-based rules (e.g., "be consistent").
  • **Heuristics:** Rules-of-thumb used by experts to identify usability problems in an interface during evaluation.

2. Shneiderman's Eight Golden Rules

Developed by Ben Shneiderman, these rules focus on designing highly usable and productive systems, especially for experienced users.

  • **1. Strive for Consistency:** Identical terminology, uniform action sequences, and consistent layout throughout the system.
  • **2. Seek Universal Usability:** Design for diverse users, offering different interaction styles or levels of detail (e.g., expert shortcuts vs. detailed prompts for novices).
  • **3. Offer Informative Feedback:** For every user action, the system must provide relevant, continuous feedback (e.g., progress bars for long operations, visual highlighting for mouse-over).
  • **4. Design Dialogs to Yield Closure:** Sequences of actions should be organized into groups with a clear beginning, middle, and end (e.g., a confirmation screen after a purchase).
  • **5. Permit Easy Reversal of Actions:** Allow users to undo actions easily (single-step or multi-step rollback) to encourage exploration and reduce anxiety.
  • **6. Support Internal Locus of Control:** Give users the feeling they are the masters of the interface, not that the system is controlling them.
  • **7. Reduce Short-Term Memory Load:** Make information and options visible and avoid requiring users to remember information across screen changes.
  • **8. Prevent Errors:** Design the system to make serious errors impossible (e.g., graying out unavailable options, providing good input validation).

3. Nielsen's 10 Usability Heuristics

Developed by Jakob Nielsen, these are the most commonly used heuristics for expert evaluation (Heuristic Evaluation) of user interfaces.

  • **1. Visibility of System Status:** The system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within reasonable time.
  • **2. Match Between System and the Real World:** Use language, concepts, and conventions familiar to the user, rather than system-oriented terms.
  • **3. User Control and Freedom:** Support undo and redo. Users need a clearly marked "emergency exit" to leave the unwanted state without extended dialogue.
  • **4. Consistency and Standards:** Users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing (internal consistency). Follow platform conventions (external consistency).
  • **5. Error Prevention:** Better than good error messages is a careful design that prevents a problem from occurring in the first place.
  • **6. Recognition Rather than Recall:** Minimize the user's memory load by making objects, actions, and options visible.
  • **7. Flexibility and Efficiency of Use:** Allow users to tailor frequent actions (e.g., accelerators, shortcuts) so novices and experts can use the system optimally.
  • **8. Aesthetic and Minimalist Design:** Dialogues should not contain information which is irrelevant or rarely needed.
  • **9. Help Users Recognize, Diagnose, and Recover from Errors:** Error messages should be expressed in plain language, precisely indicate the problem, and constructively suggest a solution.
  • **10. Help and Documentation:** While it is better if the system can be used without documentation, it should be available, easy to search, and focused on the user's task.

4. Application in Design and Evaluation

These principles are primarily used in two ways throughout the design process:

Design Guidance:

Before coding, designers use these rules to ensure their conceptual model and interface layout adhere to best practices, thereby building in usability from the start.

Heuristic Evaluation:

A discount usability method where 3-5 experts independently examine an interface and check its compliance against the 10 Heuristics (or 8 Golden Rules). This quickly reveals a large portion of the major usability problems.

  • **Key Benefit:** Faster and cheaper than full usability testing with real users.

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