design-notes

seven-principles.md

Refresher - Seven Fundemental Principles of Design

1. Discoverability Makes it easy to understand where to perform actions For example clear focal points (call to actions, images and headers), visual hiearchy (content structured in order of priority), obvious navigation systems all constitute to good discoverability.

2. Feedback Communicates response to our actions When interacting with a product or interface we need some way to communicate the result of our actions. Without any immediate feedback, we are left wondering whether our action has had an impact. Good feed must be immediate, informative, planned (unobstrusive) and prioritized.

3. Conceptual Models Simple explanations of how things work

4. Affordance The perceived action of an object, that can help determine it's operation Affordance relies on knowledge in the head (what we already understand) and cultural relevance.

5. Signifiers Tells us where to perform an action As with affordance, similarly signifiers depend on cultural understanding, for example a search icon could be understood as a ping pong bat in some cultures.

6. Mappings Relationships between the controls and the effect they have

7. Constraints Help restrict the kind of actions that can take place Users are often burdened with too much content which can cause information overload. Constraints can restrict the kind of interactions that can take place, in turn reducing the amount of information we process. There are different forms of constraints from physical, logical, semantic and logical