Although not a new topic the principles of design are often taken for granted as being largely aesthetic considerations. This is particularly so for people like myself who are from a 2D background.
It is important however to recognise how such principles extend beyond the visual organisation of design elements into the realm of experience design.
In 1997 NC State University, The Center for Universal Design, developed a set of Universal Design principles compiled by advocates of universal design, [listed in alphabetical
order: Bettye Rose Connell, Mike Jones, Ron Mace, Jim Mueller, Abir
Mullick, Elaine Ostroff, Jon Sanford, Ed Steinfeld, Molly Story, and
Gregg Vanderheiden.]
The seven principles are listed as:
principle one: equitable use
principle two: flexibilty in use
principle three: simple and intuitive
principle four: perceptible information
principle five: tolerance for error
principle six: low physical effort
principle seven: size and space for approach and use
A recent posting at the lovely site UIGarden provides more detail. It’s a great site and I think you will enjoy browsing this and other articles.
8 comments so far
I love irony. While there are few hard and fast guidelines in UI design the uigarden.com breaks one of the longest standing most obvious one. Buttons and link should look like buttons and link, or at the very least visually communicate their affordance (in Normans’ words) or pliancy (in Cooper’s words).
Well the text links into the uigarden.com from the homepage are completely undifferentiated from the block text on the page. There is no visual cue that there is anyway to get past the front page. Sure these links have rollovers, but unless you either read carefully (which web users do not do) or rollover the link (which users may not do) everything grinds to a halt at the front door.
Admittedly I didn’t bother going into the site even after I found the link, because this incredibly obvious usability error completely undermined the entire site’s credibility for me. Still, I loved the irony.
Interesting…you know I have always felt that “rules” are made to be broken…gets me into trouble all the time with people who don’t share this view. However, I digress. The point I would like to share in regards to this comment is related to a theme I hold dear to my heart. Culture and design.
I think that a really major weakness in many western perspectives is that there is a clear underlying assumption that other cultural perspectives and values are based on western principles and values. I argue that this deficiency is shared by designers no less than any other group or profession.
So - sure this site may not conform to your “expectations” or “guidelines”, or those of any other “expert”[hate that word]. Such guidelines may not even be a blip on the radar of a Chinese, Indian or African person…it’s worth considering.
For what it is worth as I suggested in my original post, I find the site useful and relatively easy to use….just my perspective. I can work the navigation and enjoy the experience. It’s enough for me…and quite a few others I suspect.
Take the time to go further and suspend your “judgement”…It seems to me that that is a REALLY important core competency for designers. I think you probably disgree however - and that’s ok. 
I’m not sure this is the right place to debate cultural relativism. Nor is culture relevant to my point since affordances are based on psychological, rather than cultural or personal, phenomenon rooted in how our brains recognize patterns and try to ascribe meaning to variances within and between patterns. I would agree that the particular meanings ascribed and how they are ascribed does vary greatly by culture, and can often be misjudged by outsiders. I would therefore agree that we should be careful of judgment, as such things are relative.
However the raw recognition of pattern variance is psychologically universal in normally functioning human brains, regardless of culture. So your implication that I am a narrow ethnocentrist (its okay, I don’t take it personally is both wrong and ad hominem.
I think it safe to say that, regardless of culture, needlessly failing to visually cue users to differences in the functionality of a product’s control makes accessing this functionality and using the product needlessly more difficult. In other words, it’s just bad design. Surely even in this relativistic world we can agree that intentionally and creating usability problems without a good reason is poor design?
Making hypertext look different from block text is done to cue the user that the hypertext does something different from the block text—I can’t imagine any cultural bias here. Sure the blue underlines are arbitrary conventions that may not cross cultural boundaries, but the psychological premise underlying the blue underline does.
Norman didn’t invent some rule. He merely popularized the understanding of the psychological phenomenon related to affordances and illustrated their connection to product design, resulting in a number of design guideline. These guidelines have been incredibly consistent with theory, practice and yes even personal experience, within and across cultures. Ignore these guidelines if you will, but ignore them at your peril.
The uigarden.com front page goes out of its way to needlessly disregard the benefits of visual affordances in its user interface design, making hypertext virtually indistinguishable from the surrounding block text. This poses predictable and unnecessary usability problems. It is therefore poor design.
Perhaps Chinese users don’t need visual cues to help disambiguate a user interface the way we “westerners” do. But the site is targeted to both Chinese and English audiences, right? Would providing clearer visual cues for the site’s western audience create usability problems for the site’s eastern audience? I suspect not. So failing to provide such cues is, once again, poor design.
Honestly, I’m not sure how to respond to your characterization of affordances in design as both my personal and narrow expectation and a western ethnocentric “blip” potentially irrelevant to African and Asian audiences. I think either you misunderstand affordances or I really misunderstood you.
You started by claiming that rules are meant to be broken. I agree—when there’s a compelling reason to break them, otherwise its just anarchy. I’ve heard design defined as the art of making meaningful order. This would mean that purposeless rule breaking is the antithesis of design. What purpose is served by the ambiguous visual treatment of hypertext and block text? Especially when the only way into the site is through a single hypertext link on the front page? Besides, I mentioned guidelines, you tilted against rules. That’s a nice strawman since the two are not the same.
Wow, I think I went on a bit too long here. Sorry folks, I’ll try to hire an editor next time.
Since there’s a good chance that I am way off base, perhaps this might be a good excuse to share some multicultural design experiences.
For instance, what common design guidelines do many of us in the west take for granted that do not translate well for non-western users?
Not sure this is a good example, but it is kind of funny. I especially like how electrical cords reinforce the electric chair connotation of the word “execution.” I doubt that was the intent. Perhaps this connotation is evident only to an American audience?
I’ve been inspired by your exchanges, Ian and niblettes, and would like to take up some issues that both of you bring up re: cultural conditioning and design values in the Education runway. However, here, I would just like to add to Ian’s point, as an Indian person :), that many written conventions - as you rightly point out niblettes, the text underlined is bad UI design, don’t occur to us [’us’ to mean those who read more than Roman or English alphabet systems] as a jarring note. I clicked through to the site, noted the green colour for the link, agreed it isn’t easy to note as it just says “Enter English site”, and clicked through. But the question of whether it should have been an icon instead did not occur to me as an issue.
Often, as you point out in the http://www.engrish.com example, other alphabets are no more than interesting typographic elements to a designer more accustomed to working in the vernacular. Heck, I’ve seen it in typographic and graphic designers in the US, where to them when laying out a page, type is just “black” to their white spaces. I can’t tell you how many design student resumes I’ve reviewed where I’ve told them that their NAME is not a typographic element to be placed sideways :)))
Anyway, this getting long, I’ll continue to pontificate on the other runway.
Here is another example of fun stuff with english, this time from India - note the three different alphabets used - Roman [english], gujurati and standard devanagri.
What I originally intended as a short post referencing the article on niversal design principles has turned out to be much more interesting than I anticipated.
For me the conversation has been very useful and given me material to reflect upon.
Actually Norman has been interviewed by UI Garden and many of the points you make Niblettes he reitterates or at least alludes to.
Here’s the link:
http://www.uigarden.net/english/when-norman-meets-chinese
Well that link to signs in India reminded me (a bit off topic) of a site devoted to pictures of potholes in Bangalore.
http://www.bangalorepothole.com/
I find it oddly comforting that regarless of race, creed, color or religion, potholes are a pain in the ass (often literally).
Or the ankle! I took a 6 ft tall friend as pillion on my 50cc two seater moped and hit a big pothole - ironically infront of the mechanics shop - my shocks were bad and it not only ripped out my muffler but I ended up in the bottom of the heap under the bike and my friend! in Bangalore