Hot answers tagged guidelines
77
Luke Wroblewski wrote about this in Top, Right or Left Aligned Form Labels (April, 2007).
In it, he references eyetracking data from an article by Matteo Penzo called Label Placement in Forms (July, 2006). Matteo drew several conclusions from this study, including that right-aligned labels have a lighter cognitive workload for users:
Alignment of ...
42
These dots, referred to as an ellipsis, always mean that there are additional options. For example when you see "Print..." it is indicating that there will be another step before there is anything sent to the printer.
Taken from The Microsoft UX Guidlines:
Design concepts Using ellipses
While command buttons are used for immediate actions, more ...
27
Put on a song that you know, and have someone hit pause and play at random times, then have them randomly turn the volume up and down.
Lowering the volume, rather than pausing the music, is less disruptive to the user. Your brain can fill in the gaps in music they are listening to if they are even somewhat familiar with it (it's why people can listen to ...
24
You should allways follow the style guide of the platform you're targeting. That way it'll be much easier for your users to understand how the app works. If you do the opposite you'll end up with unnecessary cognitive load on your Android users trying to figure out how your iOS-like app works.
23
In English, both in computers and under the blue ceiling, title-style capitalization (capitalizing first letters of nearly all words) is for titles, and sentence-style capitalization (capitalize only the first letter for the first word) is for sentences. Titles generally include headers for your documents, pages, and sections therein and labels for controls. ...
21
Two things I'd recommend:
Have a conversation with them and find out how passionate they are about what they do. This is a good indicator for whether someone's a good hire for any industry, but specifically, you want to gauge how well they're involved and up to speed with events. I find people who know what's going on, what's new, what's cutting edge and ...
19
Don't design for a resolution at all. It's 2011, the state of our art has matured past that point. Check out Ethan Marcotte's article on Responsive Web Design, and then buy his book (well worth the money - one of the few technology books I'd recommend this year).
Base your design on modular, scalable elements that can grow or shrink with the size of the ...
17
Visibility of system status - The user should always understand what is happening right now. Where is she in the system (e.g highlight the right tab in the navigation menu)? What is the system doing (e.g loading animation when a page loads)? If there's an error - what's wrong (e.g "wrong password" message under the password field, if the user entered a ...
16
I'm going to give you a high level answer since everyone else is already tackling the "show one or two messages" part.
Don't be one of those apps
Instead, here are some counterquestions to possibly affect your design decisions:
What percentage of users is going to encounter problems if they don't reboot? Is it worth nagging 100% of your users if <5% ...
16
The guidelines for Windows 8 desktop applications are the same as for Windows 7.
That means that you'll find them here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa511440.aspx
Windows 8 has two separate UIs: Windows Store apps (formerly known as "Metro-style apps") and Desktop.
Windows Store apps is the new, future oriented touch UI. ...
15
If you have the resources, you should follow the guidelines for whichever platform the app is on.
In the past many companies considered iOS to be 'the market' and only made Android apps as an afterthought. As a result, they often simply built an iOS app in Android to save them time and cost. This wasn't done because it was a better way of doing it, just a ...
13
Generally speaking, using a grid system is nearly always a good idea: it's simply one of the best available tools to visually organise (i.e. compose) your content in a coherently structured, well-proportioned, yet sufficiently flexible manner. You might want to think of it as best practice. Most good designers regularly use them, unless it makes sense to go ...
12
Apple
iPhone & iPad (iOS) User Experience Guidelines
iPhone & iPad (iOS) User Interface Guidelines
Mac OS X User Experience Guidelines
Mac OS X User Interface Guidelines
Google
Android User Interface Guidelines
Design Principles
Google TV Web Site Optimization Resources
Website Design & Content Guidelines
BlackBerry
Blackberry Browser ...
12
Ask them to complete a small task.
Here is how I was tested a few years ago. I think this was taken from a NNgroup workshop.
Task: Sandwich Choice UI
This is a web interface for choosing sandwiches. Users are busy office workers on their lunch break.
List the issues with this UI. Redesign the interface. Feel free to use any kind of controls (links, ...
11
I know there's an accepted answer, and I usually do quite agree with Michael, but still this does bug my mind for two days.
As a developer, I hated the Apple HIG
It just didn't tell me what to do, how to do things in practice.
The Windows Guideline was felt as "empty", but it could be that it did because it seemed, on Windows, actually noone follows them.
...
10
You may also be able to rephrase the question and avoid the somewhat unusual "at least one is required" construction with something like this:
It is a little clunky, but it does get around the problem of presenting a user with a form type that most people haven't seen before.
10
UPDATE: We've published new guidelines for App Widgets for Android 4.0:
http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/ui_guidelines/widget_design.html
These include a PSD template package.
Although this isn't comprehensive, I have some PSD and PNG templates that may help with the visual design of app widgets:
...
10
Right-aligned, definitely.
You can see this as a function of the Gestalt Grouping Principles: objects that are close together will be visually parsed together and interpreted as belonging together. Obviously, this is useful so people can read smoothly from label to text field. Therefore, by right-aligning the labels next to their corresponding text-fields, ...
10
The best way here is to remove all read-only fields from the form. You have to find some other way to show this info. But if there is no way to remove them, so make sure that they don't look like input field.
For fields with default value you just have to put some value in them; with black input font color. (grey color will confuse them, because a lot of ...
9
There are four source of information to integrate to make a style guide:
Existing Applications and Organization Documentation
Review applications your organization currently produces as well as other products used by your users. You are looking for two things:
Similarities and differences among applications. Identify things that are de facto standards ...
9
Sometimes I'll position my labels immediately above or sometimes immediately to the left of form elements. It simply depends on space constraints of the page I'm working with. But once I make my decision I'm consistent it with it.
There are a couple guidelines I follow for each case:
If you place the label above the textbox, make sure you provide ...
9
They do this because it is easily recognizable by their users. Apple stresses using standard interface elements in their iOS Human Interface Guidelines:
In iOS, the UIKit framework provides a wide range of UI elements that you can use in your application. As you design the user interface of your app, always remember that users expect the standard views ...
8
You already named the definitive sources for desktop applications for the two major operating systems. Those guidelines from Apple and Microsoft are what you should be following.
8
I'm not aware of a conventional better solution. In situations like these I try to do something like this, with visual grouping of the alternative fields and placing the asterisk next to the group title:
Sometimes it works, sometimes - not so much.
Also, it's always a good idea to use inline validation, but it's doubly helpful here.
8
According to the Wikipedia page on Gestalt psychology, Christian von Ehrenfels introduced the concept in his work Über Gestaltqualitäten (On the Qualities of Form, 1890). That appears to be the original published work on Gestalt as a concept in psychology.
It might be worth following the Gestalt psychology topic on Quora to see if some interesting ...
8
There are no hard, universal rules for designing any particular class of software. The design of your application will vary radically depending on the most likely use-cases for it, and the kind of tasks you imagine it being used for.
If, for example, you imagine your user creating lots of small scripts from scratch (perhaps to manage automated tests, for ...
8
Where the words would be an issue in the context of the application - either misunderstood or liable to be considered offensive - they should not be used. Words like Icon and Abort are probably well enough understood.
However, if you have an application for managing and registering religious art, then using the word icon to relate to anything other than a ...
8
The requirements section of wikipedia's page on user interface design is a good start. It refers to ISO 9241, particularly part 10 which has been withdrawn and replaced with ISO 9241-110:2006†
There's the UX principles that mozilla use as keywords to tag bugs in bugzilla which are based on Jakob Nielsen's Ten Usability Heuristics.
I've recently been ...
8
Yes there is.
Apple OS X UX Guidelines: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/AppleHIGuidelines/Intro/Intro.html
Apple iOS Guidelines: http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/userexperience/conceptual/mobilehig/Introduction/Introduction.html
Android UX Guidelines: ...
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