GUI design techniques to enhance user experience [closed]

Answer 1

I like to follow these 3 guidelines:

1. Standard - follow known standards/patterns, reuse ideas from all products you respect
2. Simple - keep your solutions simple and easy to change (if needed)
3. Elegant - use less to accomplish more

Answer 2

The best technique I found is to put your self in the users shoes. What would you like to see from the GUI and put that in front. This also gives you the ability to prioritize as those things should be done first then work from there.

To do this I try to find "layers of usefulness" and add / subtract from the layers until it seems clean. Basically to find the layers I make a list of all the functions the GUI needs to have, all the functions it should have, and all the functions it would be neat to have. Then I group those so that every thing has logical ordering and the groupings become the "layers". From the layers I then add the most important functionality (or what would be used for Day to Day operation) and that becomes the most prominent part, and I work things into the feature around those items.

One of the toughest things is navigation as you have so much to give the use how do you make it helpful and this is where the layers really help. It makes it easy to see how to layout menus, how other pieces interact, what pieces can be hidden, etc.

I have found the easiest way to do this is to start by see what and how your users function on a day to day basis this which will make it easier to get in their shoes (even better is to do their job for a few days). Then make some demonstrations and put them in front of users even if they are Paper Prototypes (there is a book on this process called Paper Prototyping by Carolyn Snyder). Then begin building it and put it in front of users as it is built often.

I will also recommended the book Designing Interfaces by Jenifer Tidwell published by O'Reilly

Answer 3

If your UI involves data entry or manipulation (typical of business apps) then I recommend affording your users the ability to act on sets of data items as much as possible. Also try to design in such a way that experienced users can interact with the UI in a very random, as opposed to sequential way (accelerator keys, hyperlinks, etc).

Answer 4

Really good feedback is extremely important. Even simple things like making it obvious what can and cannot be clicked can be overlooked or too subtle. Feedback when something might happen in the background is great. In gmail, it's great that there's a status ribbon appearing at the top that let's you know if something is sending or loading, but it's even better that it lets you know that something has sent successfully or is still loading.

The "yellow fade" technique is something else made popular amongst the RoR crowd that accomplishes something similar. You never want the user to ask the question, "What just happened?" or "What will happen when I do this?".

Another trick that has become more popular lately that I've been using a lot is editing in place. Instead of having a view of some data with a separate "edit" screen (or skipping the view and only having an edit screen), it can often be more user friendly to have a nicely laid out view of some data and just click to edit parts of it. This technique is really only appropriate when reading the data happens more often than editing, and is not appropriate for serious data-entry.