It must be a reoccurring trend that every 6 months I find myself searching for new User Interface best practices. I figured I would blog about it, so I can reference it later and update it as I find new gems.
Jakob Nielsen is a user interface design expert and has a lot of information on his web site (http://www.useit.com) and blog (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/). Some of his styles might seem a bit bland, but his design principles are very useful. One post in particular "Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design" (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9605.html), is a be very useful starting point in designing pages and general content.
There are 2 best practice rules of thumb that stem from #8 summary in the link above:
1) look at how other sites handle the situation and pick the best one
2) people will spend most of their time using other sites, so unless the company is a web innovator, follow the heard and don't stray too far from it.
Donald Norman (http://www.jnd.org) is another user interface design expert. He focuses on emotional design and human-centered design. He does a good job of analyzing interface design in many areas most people probably don't think about (not just for the web) and does it
without getting into technical jargon. He has a lot of blogs (http://www.jnd.org/index.xml) and essays (http://www.jnd.org/dn.pubs.html) on his site for free.
Jef Raskin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jef_Raskin) is one of the most famous interface design experts. He is credited with the interface design for the Apple Macintosh UI. He focuses on intuitive interface design. He wrote an excellent book called "The Humane Interface" (http://books.google.com/books?id=D39vjmLfO3kC&dq=jef+raskin&printsec=fr
ontcover&source=bl&ots=COpDb3aX-a&sig=oNwG4mfm_cALGt3NlRAQr9UJOnA). I read it in college. "Jef Raskin on 'Intuitive Interfaces'" (http://www.asktog.com/papers/raskinintuit.html) would be a good read to further understand Jakob's #8.
- Other good references -
Rules of Thumb for Web Design
http://www.firelily.com/opinions/thumb.html
Yale Style Manual - Web Style Guide
http://www.webstyleguide.com/index.html?/contents.html
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