7 tips to improve your application interface

Being an interface designer, I still often see a situation when developers or someone else from the team have to design interfaces.
Of course, it is better when there is a designer in the team, but what if he is not there?

Once I gathered a set of simple rules that help avoid 80% of the most common mistakes concerning the construction of interfaces. I decided to share them for the habrasoobshchestva.
Who cares - welcome under cat.

I must say that the following helps well in simple cases, but all this is clearly not enough if we are talking about a complex UI-loaded mass market project.
The purpose of the article is to identify the most important areas to be remembered rather than provide in-depth information on each of them.
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1. The most important

How will it be used? This is the most important thing to understand.

I like the definition of Jeff Raskin (the designer who worked, among other things, on the legendary Apple II and wrote the cult designer book “Interface” ) that the interface is a way to interact with the product.

That is - it is not external beauty in the first place, you need to clearly imagine how your product will be used.

Now set priorities.
Highlight 1-2 basic functions and use case and focus on them efforts. If something is not important, users are more likely to forgive.

2. Make basic functions as accessible as possible and hide rare functions.

Agree, easier to understand Google Docs than in MS Office?
Yes, Google-dox covers fewer cases, but these are 90% of the most common cases. Yes, in 10 cases out of 100 it will be confused by the office, but in 90 cases people will be much happier. And for someone, these rare functions will never be needed.
Who needs the rare functions - and so they will get to them.

3. Remove extra clicks

The fewer actions to achieve a goal, the better. For example, make a list of radiobuttons instead of combobox (if space permits), this will reduce one click.
Or - automatically determining the location of the user, you save him from having to spend time manually entering a place.

As soon as you start thinking about what else to remove, you will find a lot of places that can be improved.

The smaller the elements, the easier it is to learn how the application works.
Therefore, throw away everything you can, do not force the user to study too much.

4. Forms, errors, feedback

Of all the best practices, the most important are for forms, error handling, and feedback.

All sorts of forms - one of the main ways to transfer information from the user to you. Registration, orders, messages are all forms.
Making a good shape is an extensive and separate topic, the discussion of which will lead us strongly away. For example, Luke Wroblevski wrote a separate book about this. That collected a lot of recommendations and interesting examples.
Learn what forms your interface has and whether they are important. If you are important, you will have to go into the question.

To err is human. Make the mistake easy to fix.
If you can not fix it, at least warn about it with a special message.
How exactly to cancel is a separate issue, and it draws on a full-fledged topic for a separate article. Designer Alan Cooper , for example, lists 9 different ways.
Most importantly, consider this possibility in principle.

Feedback when performing any actions is another important point that greatly influences the perception of the application as a whole. If the user added something, sent, deleted, changed - inform him about it. Otherwise, he will perform the same action a hundred times and wonder why nothing happens.
If the data loads for a long time, hang up loading, so your application will seem less slow.

5. Keep important information in plain sight.

What is important information?
The one that reports on the state of the system and allows you to quickly navigate through it. Usually this:
1) sammari or basket
2) quick access to the menu and other parts of the system,
3) search

It is convenient to do this with a socket at the top of the interface and freeze it when scrolling.

Almost everyone uses this technique - from Apple and Google, to any service that makes the "Exit" button in the upper right corner.

7. Remember everything the user has entered.

First, it will save him time.
Secondly, it often reduces the number of clicks (for example, remembering a location, personal data, regular purchases)
Third, give you valuable information for analysis.

An excellent example here is again the service Google Drive . Instant autosave of documents allows not to think at all that data should be saved.

Or another good example is Amazon . Amazon constantly accumulates information about all actions (not only purchases) - what did you see, where did you go, etc. This allows you to create an excellent system of recommendations, in which exactly those goods that interest you are easily accessible - “with this product they often buy”, etc.

This article does not address many issues - the specifics of e-commerce, enterprise, web vs mobile, mobile vs tablet, forms, authorizations, error handling, as well as issues related to the construction of the process (this is the case when the designer on the project is). If any of this is interesting to the community, then let me know.

And here is a small list of books that can be useful for deepening the topic.

For developers :
Jeff Raskin. Interface
Alan Cooper. About the interface
Bruce Tognazzini. Tog on Interface

There is also an excellent book by Jennifer Tidwell, “Development of User Interfaces,” but it is already more specialized.

For project managers :
Alan Cooper. Mental hospital in the hands of patients

For those whose brain needs a reboot :
Victor Papanek. Design for the real world
Donald Norman. Design of familiar things

Well, the main, in my opinion, book about how to create good products is the biography of Steve Jobs, the author Isaacson

Enjoy your work on projects :)