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Responses to input should be immediate and should assure the user

8 points by MetaWhirledPeas ↗ HN
What are your ground rules for user interfaces?

Here are some I decided on:

1. Responses to input should be immediate and should assure the user of which input occurred

2. Once displayed, controls should not change position without user input

3. Buttons should be unambiguous

4. Selections should be unambiguous

5. Controls and content should conform to accessibility standards

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Story time for #1: My Mom's Fire TV

"Alexa, channel 11"

The TV does nothing

A spinning animation appears (Loading ~something~ but what? Did it even hear me correctly?)

A half minute later, the TV arrives on channel 11

^^^ This is particularly problematic when you get the command wrong.

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Story time for #2: Azure Portal

Load Application Insights (a log viewer)

Go to click on a filter...

Filter button moves, is now replaced by an ~Install Snapshot Debugger~ button

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Story time for #3: Google Chromecast (and every streaming app ever)

Watch TV show

Pause TV show

Mess with the settings

Try to resume the video. Which button is selected? ~I DON'T KNOW~

3 comments

[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 17.2 ms ] thread
mikewarot
I learned the rules back in the days of MS-DOS and slow as heck floppy drives, so you might want to adjust them a bit.

  1. The user should always see some form of acknowledgement to their input in a few seconds.
  2. There should never be more than 30 seconds between proof of life. (The Windows "this program is not responding" message is a lie, and needs to go). This is why we had spinning cursors...  -/|\-/|\- repeat
  3. There should always be a "Press F1 for Help" somewhere on the screen
  4. Never allow the user to express an invalid state... don't enable the "submit" button until all the required fields are valid.
  5. Never make a user type data more than once, each data entry step is a source of errors.
  6. If possible, run the User Interface in its own thread, so that it always responds in less than 50 milliseconds.
  7. When communicating with a remote device, never lose data because the connection was broken, always be able to recover if the connection is re-established, and restarted.
MetaWhirledPeas
These are good. Some, like 4 and 5, I take for granted although I shouldn't. 7 is great; I admit I've all but given up on interfaces' ability to do this; I've grown too accepting of stalled processes that require blunt intervention from the user, like reloads, force quits, and reboots.

But immediate feedback seems like low-hanging fruit; If 90s me could see how slow basic user interfaces responded 30 years in the future he would be shaking his head. We've all grown complacent.

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