Here’s an excellent video on Web Application Usability presented by 37Signals Ryan Singer. Below the video are some points from the presentation.
Anyone who is involved with how software works should keep this close at hand. It’s an excellent presentation on keeping it simple when designing software and concrete examples of what keeping it simple means.
Three points from the presentation:
- Screens
- Flow
- Language
Screens
- Need to flow from screen to screen
- What is the screen for? Be very specific
- Make a screen’s purpose clear
- Clarity on the screen – You can see right away where to go on a screen to get something done and how things relate instantly. You’re not hunting and pecking and trying to figure out what’s what.
- Edward Tufte – Great Inspiration – Book: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd edition
- What we want is Strong, Normal, Weak elements of a page.
- Pay attention to contrast – It will determine what grabs your readers
- BuzzFeed – Great site that demonstrates easy scanning of their page
- Any time things are the same weight on a page, you haven’t decided what’s important
- What’s the most important element(s) on the screen?
The screen process to keep in mind is:
- What is important?
- Make that pop out
- Make everything else fade back
Flow
- Reduce clicks to complete actions on a page
- Move from field to field without pausing
- Don’t jump back and forth while entering data
Language
- Interface design is copy writing
- Does it make sense to the user
- Example: Why tell users to Export to CSV; Use Export to Excel which reads CSV. Most people know what Excel is, not CSV.
- Present choices to your users as if you’re having a conversation with a human and not a machine.
- You’re not submitting stuff when you provide submit buttons, your doing something like “Add a Person”, etc.
- Clarify the language
- Don’t make it a “techy” process by using “techy” terms.
Review
- Prioritize what’s important
- Emphasize and de-emphasize
- Smoth out the flow
- Clarify your language
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