Improved, dashing #USER-INTERFACE @HRMantra Software Pvt Ltd 4 smarter org

Before I begin to answer that, it’s vitally important to remember that the web is primarily a content delivery network. The majority of traffic on the web comes from people looking for information; whether it’s for educational purposes, reading the latest news articles or connecting socially with others. Knowing this, it’s important that we design our products around our users.

“As far as the customer is concerned, the interface is the product.” – Jef Raskin, Interface expert at Apple Inc (circa 1970).

Interface design is the art of making the interaction between the human and the computer seamless and as effortless as possible. Everything (at some level) on your computer is an interface, created and designed to allow you access to the data you want.

The 6 main principles of user interface designAccording to Larry Constantine and Lucy Lockwood, taken from the wiki article:

• The structure principle: Design should organize the user interface purposefully, in meaningful and useful ways based on clear, consistent models that are apparent and recognizable to users, putting related things together and separating unrelated things, differentiating dissimilar things and making similar things resemble one another. The structure principle is concerned with overall user interface architecture.

• The simplicity principle: The design should make simple, common tasks easy, communicating clearly and simply in the user’s own language, and providing good shortcuts that are meaningfully related to longer procedures.

• The visibility principle: The design should make all needed options and materials for a given task visible without distracting the user with extraneous or redundant information. Good designs don’t overwhelm users with alternatives or confuse with unneeded information.

• The feedback principle: The design should keep users informed of actions or interpretations, changes of state or condition, and errors or exceptions that are relevant and of interest to the user through clear, concise, and unambiguous language familiar to users.

• The tolerance principle: The design should be flexible and tolerant, reducing the cost of mistakes and misuse by allowing undoing and redoing, while also preventing errors wherever possible by tolerating varied inputs and sequences and by interpreting all reasonable actions.

• The reuse principle: The design should reuse internal and external components and behaviors, maintaining consistency with purpose rather than merely arbitrary consistency, thus reducing the need for users to rethink and remember.

Interfaces on the webAs web designers (developers, interface designers, ninjas or whatever you want to call yourself) we have a responsibility to design intuitive and well thought-out interfaces for our users. There should be no difference between the design process for the web and the process of designing for any other platform. In other words, we should use the same basic principles we would for an application for a desktop, a mobile or a tablet device.

Understanding the userGreat designers do their research; they find out exactly who they are selling to and they design their application to their target audience. Knowing who your users are going to be is the starting point of a great interface design.

Take children as an extreme example. That’s a target audience that if you don’t take into consideration from the start you’re going to fail. Some of the key elements to a site designed for children are bold, bright colours, elements from nature they can relate to and large type. These are things you may not consider when, for example; designing for a broadsheet newspaper.