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Book Review: Designing with the Mind in Mind – Appendix

Design Implications and Recommendations | Overview of the Book | Back to Review

By Gerd Waloszek, SAP User Experience – October 20, 2010

This appendix provides a list of design implications and recommendations that are provided throughout Jeff Johnson's book, Designing with the Mind in Mind, an overview of the book, and references.

 

Design Implications and Recommendations

The following design implications and recommendation were extracted from Jeff Johnson's book Designing with the Mind in Mind. Some of them can be found as headings (or bullet list headings), others were extracted from the body text. Chapter numbers are given in the format "CX".

Design Implications

The following guidelines were explicitly marked as design implications.

We perceive what we expect (C1)

  • Avoid ambiguity
  • Be consistent
  • Understand the goals

Reading is unnatural (C4)

  • Don't disrupt reading, support it
    • Avoid: difficult or tiny fonts, patterned background, centering
    • Use restricted, highly consistent vocabularies (plain/simplified language)
    • Format text to create a visual hierarchy
  • Minimize the need for reading

Implications of Short-Term Memory Characteristics for User Interface Design (C7)

  • Modes: Avoid modes or provide strong feedback about which mode the system is in
  • Search results: Show the term that generated the results of a search
  • Instructions: Display instructions in a way that people can refer to them while executing them (for multi-step instructions until completing all steps)

Implications of Long-Term Memory Characteristics for User Interface Design (C7)

  • Avoid developing systems that burden long-term memory
  • Enhance learning and memory by user-interface consistency

Recognition versus Recall: Implications for UI Design (C9)

  • See and choose is easier than recall and type
  • User pictures where possible to convey function
  • Use thumbnail to depict full-sized images compactly
  • The larger the number of people who will use a function, the more visible the function should be
  • Use visual cures to let users recognize where they are
  • Make authentication information easy to recall

Problem Solving: Implications for UI Design (C10)

  • Interactive systems should minimize the amount of attention users must devote to operating them, because that pulls precious cognitive resources away from the task a user came to the computer to do.
    • Prominently indicate system status and users' progress toward their goal.
    • Guide users toward their goal.
    • Tell users explicitly and exactly what they need to know.
    • Don't make users diagnose system problems.
    • Minimize the number and complexity of settings.
    • Let people use perception rather than calculation.
    • Make the system familiar.
    • Let the computer do the math.

Design Recommendations

The following guidelines were not marked as design implications, therefore they are characterized as recommendations.

Structure (C3)

  • We seek and use visual structure
  • Structure enhances people's ability to scan long numbers
  • Data-specific controls provide even more structure
  • Visual hierarchy lets people focus on the relevant information

Guidelines for using Color (C5)

  • Distinguish colors by saturation and brightness as well as hue
  • Use distinctive colors
  • Avoid color pairs that color-blind people cannot distinguish
  • Use color redundantly with other cures
  • Separate strong opponent colors

Common Methods of Making Messages Visible (C6)

  • Put it where the users are looking
  • Mark the error
  • Use an error symbol
  • Reserve red for errors

Heavy Artillery for Making Users Notice Messages: Use Sparingly (C6)

  • Pop-up message in error dialog box
  • User sound (e.g., beep)
  • Flash or wiggle briefly
  • Use them sparingly

Attention (C8)

  • Software applications and Websites should not call attention to themselves; they should fade into the background and allow users to focus on their own goals
  • Interactive systems should indicate what users have done versus what they have not yet done
  • Interactive systems should be designed so that the information scent is strong and really does lead users to their goals
  • Preference for familiar, relatively mindless paths:
    • Sometimes mindlessness trumps keystrokes
    • Guide users to the best paths
    • Help experiences users speed up
  • Support users in carrying out the goal-execute-evaluate cycle
    • Goal: Provide clear paths for the user goals that the software is intended to support
    • Execute: Base software objects on the task rather than the implementation
    • Evaluate: Provide feedback and status information to show users their progress toward the goal.
  • Design interactive systems to remind people that loose-end steps remain or to even complete the task itself:

Learning (C11)

  • Terminology: We learn faster when vocabulary is task-focused, familiar, and consistent
    • Terminology should be task-focused
    • Terminology should be familiar
    • Terminology should be consistent
    • Developing a task-focused, familiar, and consistent terminology is easier with a good conceptual model
  • Risk: We learn faster when risk is low
    • Prevent errors where possible
    • Deactivate invalid commands
    • Make errors easy to detect by showing users clearly what they have done
    • Allow users to undo, reverse, or correct errors easily

Additional Guidelines for Achieving Responsive Interactive Systems (12)

  • Use busy indicators
  • Use progress indicators
  • Delays between unit tasks are less bothersome than delays within unit tasks
  • Display important information first
  • Fake heavyweight computations during hand-eye coordination tasks
  • Work ahead
  • Process user input according to priority, not the order in which it was received
  • Monitor time compliance; decrease the quality of work to keep up
  • Provide timely feedback even on the Web

 

Overview of the Book

Chapters
Topics
Introduction and more User interface design rules
  • 1. We Perceive What We Expect
  • 2. Our Vision is Optimized to See Structure
  • 3. We Seek and Use Visual Structure
  • 4. Reading Is Unnatural
  • 5. Our Color Vision is Limited
  • 6. Our Peripheral Vision is Poor
 Visual perception (top down effects, Gestalt laws (visual structure), reading, color vision, peripheral vision)
  • 7. Our Attention is Limited; Our Memory is Imperfect
  • 8. Limits on Attention, Shape, Thought and Action
  • 9. Recognition is Easy; Recall is Hard
  • 10. Learning from Experience and Performing Learned Actions are Easy; Problem Solving and Calculations are Hard
  • 11. Many Factors Affect Lsearning
 Attention, memory (recognition versus recall), learning (problem solving/conscious actions versus automatic actions)
  • 12. We Have Time Requirements
Responsiveness (time requirements)
Epilogue, Appendix, Bibliography, Index Examples of collections of well known user interface design rules

 

 

References

 

 

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