The principles of user interface design are intended to improve the quality of user interface design.
- The structure principle: Design should organize the user interface purposefully, in meaningful and useful ways based on clear, consistent models, putting related things together and separating unrelated things, making similar things resemble one another. The structure principle is concerned with overall user interface architecture.
- The simplicity principle: The design should make simple, common tasks easy, communicating simply in the user's own language, and providing good shortcuts that are related to longer procedures.
- The visibility principle: The design should make all needed options for a given task visible without distracting the user with redundant information. Good designs don't overwhelm users with alternatives or confuse with unneeded information.
- The feedback principle: The design should keep users informed of actions, changes of state or condition, and errors or exceptions that are relevant to the user through clear, concise, and unambiguous language familiar to users.
- The tolerance principle: The design should be rather flexible, reducing the amount of mistakes and misuse by allowing undoing and redoing, while also preventing errors wherever possible by tolerating varied inputs and sequences and by interpreting all reasonable actions.
- The reuse principle: The design should reuse most components, maintaining consistency with purpose rather than merely arbitrary consistency, this will reduce the need for users to rethink and remember.
http://wiki.osafoundation.org/Journal/HumaneUserInterface20041102 Laws of Interface Design
