A Fusion of Shneiderman’s Eight Golden Rules and Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics
In this world of digital landscape, creating user interfaces that captivate and retain users’ attention is a challenge. To tackle this challenge, designers often turn to established principles and guidelines that have stood the test of time. Two pillars of UI design, Shneiderman’s Eight Golden Rules and Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics, provide a solid foundation for crafting interfaces that are not only visually appealing but also intuitive and efficient. By understanding and implementing these principles, designers can elevate their designs, creating experiences that seamlessly blend functionality with user satisfaction. Implementing those UI design principle will ease the user understand what to and how to do. In this article we will learn about both principles apply it to our design. Let’s go dive in and understand what those principles are.
Shneiderman’s Eight Golden Rules
Shneiderman’s rules provide a framework for designing interfaces that are user-friendly and efficient. They include:
- Strive for consistency: Maintain consistent layouts, icons, and interactions throughout the interface.
- Enable frequent users to use shortcuts: Provide shortcuts for experienced users to expedite their interactions.
- Offer informative feedback: Provide clear and immediate feedback for user actions to confirm their actions.
- Design dialogs to yield closure: Ensure that interactions and dialogs have a clear beginning, middle, and end.
- Offer simple error handling: Prevent errors by designing interfaces that are intuitive and easy to use and provide clear error messages when errors occur.
- Permit easy reversal of actions: Provide easy ways for users to undo actions, such as using the “Ctrl+Z” shortcut.
- Support internal locus of control: Design interfaces that make users feel in control by providing clear paths and options.
- Reduce short-term memory load: Minimize the need for users to remember information by providing clear and concise prompts and instructions.
Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics
Nielsen’s heuristics are a set of general principles for interaction design. They include:
- Visibility of system status: Keep users informed about what is happening through appropriate feedback within a reasonable time.
- Match between system and the real world: Speak the users’ language, use concepts familiar to them, and follow real-world conventions.
- User control and freedom: Allow users to easily navigate and exit unwanted states without extensive navigation or confirmation dialogs.
- Consistency and standards: Follow platform conventions and industry standards to make the interface more predictable.
- Error prevention: Design the interface to prevent errors in the first place, rather than relying solely on error messages.
- Recognition rather than recall: Minimize the user’s memory load by making objects, actions, and options visible and easily retrievable.
- Flexibility and efficiency of use: Provide shortcuts and accelerators to cater to both novice and expert users.
- Aesthetic and minimalist design: Strive for simplicity and clarity in design, avoiding unnecessary elements or information.
- Help users recognize, diagnore, and recover from errors: Error messages should be expressed in plain language (no error codes), precisely indicate the problem, and constructively suggest a solution.
- Help and documentation: It’s best if the system doesn’t need any additional explanation. However, it may be necessary to provide documentation to help users understand how to complete their tasks.
Implementing Shneiderman’s Eight Golden Rules and Nielsen’s Usability Heuristics to Enhance UI Design
In this section, I will show you the example of our project @/Nani design that following those rules and why is it beneficial for the users.
Visibility of system status (Nielsen) — Offer informative feedback; design dialog to yield closure (Shneider)
Both emphasize the importance of providing feedback to the user about what is happening. Nielsen’s rule focuses on keeping users informed about what the system is doing, while Shneider’s rule stresses the need for immediate feedback to actions.
This page will show the success status after user successfully registered an account with google account.
Match between system and the real world; Consistency and standards (Nielsen) — Strive for consistency (Shneider)
Both guidelines emphasize making the system’s language and concepts align with those familiar to the user and maintaining consistency in design elements and behavior throughout the interface. This helps users understand and navigate the system more easily.
For each field we use an icon to make it more clear to the user. We use icons that easily to understand and align its concept in real words. This will help the users to understand what they should fill in the fields.
We use the same icons for login page to maintain the design consistency.
User control and freedom; Flexibility and efficiency of use (Nielsen) —Enable frequent users to use shortcuts (Shneider)
These guidelines advocate for giving users the ability to control their interactions and move freely within the system. Providing shortcuts for frequent actions allows experienced users to perform tasks more efficiently, enhancing their overall user experience.
We provide a shortcut for experienced user to access the chatbot feature.
Error prevention; Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors (Nielsen) — Offer simple error handling (Shneider)
Both guidelines focus on minimizing the occurrence and impact of errors. Nielsen’s guideline suggests designing interfaces that prevent errors, while Schneider’s guideline emphasizes providing clear error messages and simple ways for users to correct mistakes.
When a user tries to submit a form with missing required fields, it displays a clear error message under to each missing field, indicating what needs to be corrected. This helps users recognize and correct errors easily.
Recognition rather than recall (Nielsen) — Reduce short-term memory load (Shneider)
These guidelines stress the importance of designing interfaces that make information and options visible, rather than requiring users to remember information from earlier in the interaction. This reduces the cognitive load on users and makes the interface easier to use.
As humans are only capable of retaining 5 items in our short term memory at one time. That’s why we only have 5 items on our navbar to easily remember by the user. The intuitive and descriptive icons made the user doesn’t need to remember what features they are. Because when the user sees the icon, they will understand it.
Aesthetic and minimalist design; Help and documentation (Nielsen) — Support internal locus of control (Shneider)
Both guidelines focus on providing users with a sense of control and understanding of the system. Aesthetic and minimalist design helps reduce cognitive overload, while providing help and documentation empowers users to solve problems on their own, reinforcing their sense of control.
By using intuitive icons and a clean layout reduces visual clutter and makes it easier for users to find what they need. Users will easily understand what each icon means from home, some strange tools (IOT), plants, money, and profile (left to right).
By maintaining consistency, providing user control, offering clear feedback, handling errors gracefully, mapping to real-world concepts, reducing memory load, and embracing simplicity, designers can craft interfaces that are not only visually stunning but also intuitive and efficient. This fusion of principles serves as a roadmap to enhance user experiences, ultimately leading to more engaging and impactful designs.
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