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→Standards and Consistency
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This is often done for a good reason in applications like 3D Modelling Environments. These applications often have a steep learning curve, are very powerful, complex and deal with something (3D) that is not common in the most applications (mostly concerned with 2D stuff. | This is often done for a good reason in applications like 3D Modelling Environments. These applications often have a steep learning curve, are very powerful, complex and deal with something (3D) that is not common in the most applications (mostly concerned with 2D stuff. | ||
"Standards" are concerned with having not to relearn things with an perspective to different applications and systems. We don't want that the user needs to relearn while using a single product as well. This is often refereed to as "consistency". This mean in your application you use the same conventions all over the place. If you e.g. enable changing the color of items via the contextmenu, this should be possible with all times. If you enable to drag and drop items drag-and drop should work application wide. Doing so means that the user just has to | "Standards" are concerned with having not to relearn things with an perspective to different applications and systems. We don't want that the user needs to relearn while using a single product as well. This is often refereed to as "consistency". This mean in your application you use the same conventions all over the place. If you e.g. enable changing the color of items via the contextmenu, this should be possible with all times. If you enable to drag and drop items drag-and drop should work application wide. Doing so means that the user just has to learn that your application allows this and that way of interaction. If the interaction is inconsistent on the other hand, users would need to learn in which places something works. | ||
An other inconsistency are functions that change the way of visual organisation. This is often done by introducing automatic functions that shall show the "most important" items on top. If often fails. Microsoft did this with the menu entries in Windows 2000. And the constant and inconsistent reordering of menu items made it a cumbersome experience. Similar are "Expert" or "Beginner Modes" that reorder the whole interface. They mostly confuse. The problem that should be tackled is clear: too many functions clutter the interface. | |||
So what is the way around this? Most importantly: design you product carefully and only include functionality that serves the users goals well. If there is no way around than you can use "progressive disclosure": The interface has some main functions that are always visible and some advanced functionality that is visible when the user demands it. Often this is done by displaying important stuff at the top and offering a button that shows the additional functions. Using this way there are no arbitrary changes nor a whole new order is introduced as the basic functions remain in place. | |||
==Visibility== | ==Visibility== | ||