An Overview of Effective User Interface Design
Part of what makes a blog successful can no doubt be found by looking into the principles of user interface (UI) design. The user interface is what the user sees and how the user interacts with a website. In the eyes of the average user, the user interface IS the system - most users are not concerned with how a website or blog works; only that it does.
Quality Content does not equal User-Friendly
Time and energy expended producing quality content can be easily negated by a poorly designed or structured site which fails to communicate that content effectively. User interface design is a broad topic which warrants much discussion here at Blog Building Experiment where the focus is on determining how a blog evolves to become successful. This article aims to address the topic of effective user interface design at a very high level and will hopefully provide some general insights into how one might go about achieving it.
I recently found myself asking the question “What are the characteristics that embody good interface design?” It’s usually quite simple to tell apart the two extremes; most people know a poorly designed site when they see one, and the same can be said vice versa. When you come to design your own blog though, being able to tell apart bad design from good doesn’t guarantee you’ll know how to implement the latter yourself. You’ll need to know what it is that distinguishes good designs from the bad, not just that “it is”. Seeing the Mona Lisa doesn’t mean you could paint it.
Texts on UI Design
I decided that user interface design was something worth looking into further, so I went searching for books on the topic. The first one I came across was Wilbert Galitz The Essential Guide to User Interface Design. At 857 pages, it’s not a short book, but for anyone serious about learning the principles of UI design, it does contain quite a bit of useful content and gets quite specific.
I can’t personally recommend any other user interface design books, but one which I continue to hear very good reports about is Steve Krugs’ Don’t Make Me Think - A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. It’s quite a small book - 216 pages, for anybody not yet enthused enough about user interface design to crack out a textbook door stop. The other thing which separates Krug’s book from Galitz’ is that Krug’s focuses only on the web, rather than user interfaces across the field of computing as a whole. In hind sight, Krug’s book is probably a better place to start for a novice looking for a practical and light hearted introduction to web usability and design. A search on Amazon will reveal a number of texts dealing with UI design.
Don’t Make the User Think
One of the core concepts underpinning all user interface design and usability texts is perhaps best summarised by the title of Steve Krug’s book - “Don’t Make Me Think”. In general terms, a poorly designed interface makes itself most apparent when the user has to begin thinking to figure out how to use the platform which is supposed to be facilitating the task they actually wish to achieve. Anything which gets in the way of the user completing the task at hand is a hindrance in terms of usability.
These hindrances can manifest themselves in a multitude of forms. It could be something as simple as using buttons which cause confusion because they don’t actually look like buttons. Another example would be using headings whose font size doesn’t properly distinguish itself from that of the body text, making page scanning difficult. Yet another example would be using some special widget which shows you the time on your webpage, but isn’t actually serving any purpose, other than to distract the user from the task at hand.
Reduce thinking - use standards
In the context of web interface design, standards refer to widely recognised and accepted ways of implementing or structuring the visual layout of content on a webpage. When a user sees blue underlined text on a webpage, there’s a general expectation that that text is a link. This is perhaps the simplest example of a web design standard.
By adhering to standards guidelines in the design of a website or blog, you make it easier for the user to focus on the task at hand, rather than the technology which facilitates it. Over time and with experience, users come to expect to see and interact with elements of a webpage in certain ways. This is their mental model of how things work and how they should be. When something contradicts the user’ mental model, cognitive dissonance tends to ensue. All of a sudden the focus shifts from performing the task at hand to negotiating the technology which is supposed to be facilitating it.
Many First Sites will not be User-Centric
For people who have never built a website before, the concept of conforming to standards can come across as being a little draconian and crippling to creativity. For many people, the first website or blog they create won’t conform to standards very well and won’t be very user-friendly. This is usually caused by things such as a lack of consistency between individual page’s design structure and the application of bleeding-edge technologies. These sites often contain little widgets or gadgets which are “neat”, but like a digital clock on a webpage, are unlikely to have much utility as far as the user is concerned.
Intentional or not, the design of many people’s first site is what I’d refer to as “creator-centric”. By this I imply that the focus of such sites tends to be for the most part on the creator’s experimentation rather than on creating something overly practical. This is a great way to learn, but if you wish to draw more people to your site or blog, it becomes important to adopt a more “user-centric” approach. One of the best ways to do this is by adhering to standards where they exist, so as not to disrupt the user’s mental model of how things should work.
Surviving the standards monotony
For those who look at standards as an impending doom for originality on the web, fear not. There’s still plenty of ways to add your own distinctive signature to your work and leave your mark on the world. The crux of the user-centric approach is to always ask yourself what would be most useful and unambiguous to your users and how can you make achieving the user’s goal as simple as possible.
UI Shortcomings of this Blog
At the time of writing, this blog is not the quintessential example of a user-centric blog. The WordPress blogging software has provided a generally tidy layout for this blog, but I can see allot of room for improvement on my part. Like anything, UI Design needs to be tended to in proportion to other aspects of a blog or site. Unfortunately, not even the most user-friendly UI in the world would write my articles for me (I asked it and it said No), so article writing has taken priority at present.
Examples of good UI Design
If you’re looking for good examples of UI Design, think of some of your favourite sites. It’s quite likely they’ll be the ones which require the least thinking on your behalf to use and allow you to do what you want to do painlessly.