20 Principles of User Interface Design

Being a UI designer is much more than pushing pretty pixels. You’ve huge responsibility on your shoulders to help your audience achieve their goals easily and completely. Just like graphic design, UI design has some principles too. Joshua Porter has compiled a list of 20 such principles, that I’m trying to remember by heart.

  1. Clarity is job #1
  2. Interfaces exist to enable interaction
  3. Conserve attention at all costs
  4. Keep users in control
  5. Direct manipulation is best
  6. One primary action per screen
  7. Keep secondary actions secondary
  8. Provide a natural next step
  9. Appearance follows behavior (aka form follows function)
  10. Consistency matters
  11. Strong visual hierarchies work best
  12. Smart organization reduces cognitive load
  13. Highlight, don’t determine, with color
  14. Progressive disclosure
  15. Help people inline
  16. A crucial moment: the zero state
  17. Existing problems are most valuable
  18. Great design is invisible
  19. Build on other design disciplines
  20. Interfaces exist to be used

Read more at Bokardo.com

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