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Ben Shneiderman

UMD HCIL

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The Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design

I have often been asked to distill the vast corpus of user interface
design into a few key principles. While I was reluctant to do this,
it turned out to be a good exercise to write "Golden Rules," that are
applicable in most interactive systems. These principles, derived
from experience and refined over three decades, require validation
and tuning for specific design domains. No list such as this can be
complete, but even the original list from 1985, has been well
received as a useful guide to students and designers. Jakob Nielsen,
Jeff Johnson, and others have expanded these rules and included their
variations, which enriches the discussion. Each edition of the book
produces some changes. This version is from Section 3.3.4 of the
Sixth edition:

Shneiderman, B., Plaisant, C., Cohen, M., Jacobs, S., and Elmqvist,
N., Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective
Human-Computer Interaction: Sixth Edition, Pearson (May 2016) http://
www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/DTUI6

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1. Strive for consistency.

Consistent sequences of actions should be required in similar
situations; identical terminology should be used in prompts, menus,
and help screens; and consistent color, layout, capitalization,
fonts, and so on, should be employed throughout. Exceptions, such as
required confirmation of the delete command or no echoing of
passwords, should be comprehensible and limited in number

2. Seek universal usability.

Recognize the needs of diverse users and design for plasticity,
facilitating transformation of content. Novice to expert differences,
age ranges, disabilities, international variations, and technological
diversity each enrich the spectrum of requirements that guides
design. Adding features for novices, such as explanations, and
features for experts, such as shortcuts and faster pacing, enriches
the interface design and improves perceived quality.

3. Offer informative feedback.

For every user action, there should be an interface feedback. For
frequent and minor actions, the response can be modest, whereas for
infrequent and major actions, the response should be more
substantial. Visual presentation of the objects of interest provides
a convenient environment for showing changes explicitly (see the
discussion of direct manipulation in Chapter 7).

4. Design dialogs to yield closure.

Sequences of actions should be organized into groups with a
beginning, middle, and end. Informative feedback at the completion of
a group of actions gives users the satisfaction of accomplishment, a
sense of relief, a signal to drop contingency plans from their minds,
and an indicator to prepare for the next group of actions. For
example, e-commerce websites move users from selecting products to
the checkout, ending with a clear confirmation page that completes
the transaction.

5. Prevent errors.

As much as possible, design the interface so that users cannot make
serious errors; for example, gray out menu items that are not
appropriate and do not allow alphabetic characters in numeric entry
fields (Section 3.3.5). If users make an error, the interface should
offer simple, constructive, and specific instructions for recovery.
For example, users should not have to retype an entire name-address
form if they enter an invalid zip code but rather should be guided to
repair only the faulty part. Erroneous actions should leave the
interface state unchanged, or the interface should give instructions
about restoring the state.

6. Permit easy reversal of actions.

As much as possible, actions should be reversible. This feature
relieves anxiety, since users know that errors can be undone, and
encourages exploration of unfamiliar options. The units of
reversibility may be a single action, a data-entry task, or a
complete group of actions, such as entry of a name-address block.

7. Keep users in control.

Experienced users strongly desire the sense that they are in charge
of the interface and that the interface responds to their actions.
They don't want surprises or changes in familiar behavior, and they
are annoyed by tedious data-entry sequences, difficulty in obtaining
necessary information, and inability to produce their desired result.

8. Reduce short-term memory load.

Humans' limited capacity for information processing in short-term
memory (the rule of thumb is that people can remember "seven plus or
minus two chunks" of information) requires that designers avoid
interfaces in which users must remember information from one display
and then use that information on another display. It means that
cellphones should not require reentry of phone numbers, website
locations should remain visible, and lengthy forms should be
compacted to fit a single display.

These underlying principles must be interpreted, refined, and
extended for each environment. They have their limitations, but they
provide a good starting point for mobile, desktop, and web designers.
The principles presented in the ensuing sections focus on increasing
users' productivity by providing simplified data-entry procedures,
comprehensible displays, and rapid informative feedback to increase
feelings of competence, mastery, and control over the system.

A. V. Williams Building, Department of Computer Science
University of Maryland,College Park, MD 20742
Phone: (301) 405-2680
Fax: (301) 405-6707

ben@cs.umd.edu

Follow Ben on Twitter: @benbendc