Consistency and Standard Good example: In this google hangout interface, the clock icon leads me to a screen that shows recent calls. I find the choice of the icon to be pretty intuitive and consistent with my prior exposure. Especially when I realize that my iPhone also applies the same clock icon to signifies calling log...

Heuristic: Visibility of system status 1.) An item that exemplifies this heuristic is the black dots below applications in the doc of OS X for Macs. This is a screenshot of the home screen of OS X, a view most people are familiar with. As you can see in the doc below, there are...

Design Heuristic: Visibility of system status The system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within reasonable time. This loading bar is a great example that epitomizes high quality visibility of system status. With this bar I can immediately see how long it takes to accomplish my goal...

  The Heuristic: User Control & Freedom – Users often choose system functions by mistake and need a clearly marked “emergency exit” that allows them to leave the unwanted state without having to go through an extended dialogue. The Good: When I was in Japan last summer, I saw so many kooky and crazy...

How could a water bottle exhibit excellent design that successfully prevents error? What even is “error” for a water bottle per se? To find answers to these questions, we need only look at the current and previous iterations of Camelback’s water bottle lids. The older version–still quite popular with a large demographic of users–features...

One very important rule of design is to speak the user’s language. Being able to match between system and the real world will help users to find your design more intuitive and easy to use. However, many software/physical designs just totally ignore this and make users so confused. Bad Examples: Two examples are stated...

This screenshot, taken from the shoe shopping section of 6pm.com, is a good example of faceted browsing. It parses different features of the product (e.g. size and width of shoe) into separate, easy to navigate menus. Users can select many different sizes and many different possible widths of shoes, and the results will reflect various...

  The concept I’ve chosen is “match between the system and the real world.” Designs that successfully exhibit this trait use styles of communication that can be correctly interpreted by new users without specialized knowledge of the system. Bad examples are produced when a design team becomes too fluent in the “language” of a...

Affordances: Good example: One of the limitations of having a water bottle this big is that it might be too difficult to hold the entire bottle in one hand comfortably. Assuming that someone actually needs to carry around this amount of water, the loop that is provided communicates to the user that a few...

  good as if REAL I start to use Macbook since last August, surprisingly it only took me several days to get used to most of operations those are wildly different from windows. Especially the “Natural Scrolling” feature. When I first played with an iPad years ago, I can clearly felt the friction while...