Friday, March 18, 2011

Good User Experience

Good user experience cannot be achieved by jazzy animations. It is these simple things that everyone wants to have.

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Some common tips for better user experience (most of us knows but we don’t follow):

1. Use standard controls. In laymen language, text should look like text and button should look like a button.

2. Optimize for speed. Everyone want to get the things done faster. Don’t put animations which hinders speed of doing something. Your UI (specially forms) should be accessible by ‘keyboard only’ as well.

3. Think about the common mistake that user may be making while data entry. When you find something wrong, locate exact position and show understandable message to show the error.

4. Try to optimize available space. You controls should be able to adjust to larger width to avoid scrollbars if possible. Don’t put big logos of the application on each screen top.

5. Find the most used flows for your UI and optimize UI so user can complete the common tasks faster. If necessary, create different views of the same UI for different kind of user in organizational hierarchy.