How to use Ben Shneiderman’s golden rules in your design
In the words of Wallace Stegner, you are truly wise, “when you recognise that the best you can do is choose which rules you want to live by, and it’s persistent and aggravated imbecility to pretend you can live without any.”
Look up rules for design, and you will be greeted with millions of websites that list a set of guidelines for you to follow — the most popular perhaps being the Nielsen-Molich heuristics for usability. Irrespective of whether you are beginning out in this field, or you are a seasoned pro, you would be expected to know these principles to make sure that all the designs you make and all the experiences you craft, are by far, free from the common usability errors.
Although less popular than Nielsen-Molich’s heuristics, Ben Shneiderman’s “golden rules” are by no means any less significant. In his text “Designing the User Interface”, American computer scientist Ben Shneiderman laid down this collection of principles that you should be applying in all interactive systems to refine the user experience. The eight golden rules for interaction design are —
- Strive for consistency
- Seek universal usability
- Offer informative feedback
- Design dialogs to yield closure
- Prevent errors
- Permit easy reversal of actions
- Give users the control, and
- Reduce short-term memory load
You can find his explanation of these principles here. But just like if you’re learning a new language and you do not get the real feel of it unless you communicate in that language, even if you learn these principles by heart you will not have actually gained a thorough understanding of their importance, unless — you see these principles in action, and you put these rules to the test.
By the end of this article you will have a clear picture of how the golden rules make design better. That will give you a firm dive-board to jump off from into the world of good mobile, desktop and web design. Here are the real-life applications of Ben Shneiderman’s golden rules for interaction design.
How to maintain consistency?
You can maintain consistency in your designs quite effectively, if the style of each element is maintained across the system, or across different platforms for the same system, like in the case of the Twitter website and the Twitter app. Evidently, the content hierarchy is maintained and the placing is in the correct location. Also the conventions for Twitter design are also consistent across web and app.
How to seek universal usability?
A simple one-liner answer for this question would be — allow frequent users to increase their productivity through the use of shortcuts.
For universal usability, you need to take into account both — the novices and the experts. You should allow for comprehensive steps for the novice users, while making provisions for experts to jump ahead and get their required work done. Almost all software applications with a significant user-base have a vast array of keyboard shortcuts to be exploited.
How to offer informative feedback?
Take a look at the following GIF. Observe what happens as soon as I click on the download button — a popup tells me how to credit the photographer, while a window opens to allow me to set the location in my computer where I want to save the photograph.
Informative feedback came not only in the form of the darker “download” button when the mouse cursor hovered over it, but also in the form of the “Say thanks” popup and the download window. All these offer informative feedback about the state that the system is currently in, thus never confusing the user about what’s going on.
How to design dialogs to yield closure?
All dialogs that come up in any state of a system, must leave no questions in the mind of the user. The best dialog design would be one that leaves no room for guesswork by the users. It should be clear and obvious for the intended audience. The dialog should also inform the users about next steps, if there are any. This is a very significant tool to help communicate the current status of the system with your users.
The dialogs that appear in the GIF above clearly indicate not only the current state but also the next steps that need to be taken without ambiguity and thus yielding closure in the overall action — saving a picture.
How to prevent errors?
If an error is avoidable, it should be dealt with immediately, like when a wrong password is entered while trying to perform a Google sign-in, shown below.
You need to be answering three primary questions to know if your design is build to prevent or even handle errors. The first question is — have you taken every possible step to make sure that this error will not occur? The second question — is the error totally unavoidable? The last, and perhaps the most important question is — if a user does make a mistake, how much effort would they need to put in to rectify the error?
How to allow easy reversal of actions?
Almost all the popular software applications today, have a feature that allows the users to reverse their actions with ease, if the desired effect was not achieved, or if the action was a mistake — the Undo and Redo options.
To use this principle effectively you need to be taking into account the number of steps that the user needs to take to reverse her/his actions. Also, there are two metrics that should be kept in mind. The first is how fast the users realise that they need to reverse their action; and the second is how quickly they can detect that there is a possibility of reversal in the first place.
How to support an internal locus of control?
Basically, whatever be the state of the system, the users should always feel in control. Nothing should be overwhelming or surprising in a negative way. Nothing screams “Who’s the boss now?!” louder than starting up Force Quit on MacOS and Task Manager on Windows.
Similarly, whenever designing systems, make sure that the user always feels in control at all touchpoints of the application or website, making it very easy and safe to navigate through. The users should never be surprised in an unpleasant way — that indicates a definite thought of uninstallation.
How to reduce short-term memory load?
I went to the Amazon website and searched for “Ben Shneiderman”. I found his book — “Designing the User Interface” and proceeded to add it to cart. However, since I did not want to “Buy Now”, it meant that I wanted to browse for more items before making a purchase. Imagine me doing this for 10–15 such books. Obviously, by the time I am done, I might have forgotten about this one, and to reduce that load, the cart button kept showing the number of items in my cart as a subtle reminder.
You should keep in mind that to reduce load on short term memory there should be visual cues and indicators to keep reminding the users about the existence of that feature. Make sure that the users are not being forced to remember more than absolutely necessary, help them recognise rather than recall, and they will be forever grateful to you.
Having seen the golden rules in action, and understood where and how to use them, it is time for you to start applying them in your projects and design-work. All said and done, you should be using these principles with an open mind and a clear picture of the problem that you are aiming to solve. These principles do have their limitations, and exercising your logic and rationale is always crucial.
Knowing the golden rules, where to apply them, and when to break these rules, will help you on the path to designing interfaces, interactions and experiences that will empower users, increasing their feelings of competence and superiority over the system — through great design.
You might want to take a look at these articles to dive deeper into heuristics, principles and in-general good design —
Cheers!
