Bureaucrats, emailconfirmed
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→Standards and Consistency
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Often designers break standards thinking they have a better solution. Sometimes there are reasons to come up with non-standard methods but it is rarely the case. You should only break standards and do things in way that is not known to the users in case... | Often designers break standards thinking they have a better solution. Sometimes there are reasons to come up with non-standard methods but it is rarely the case. You should only break standards and do things in way that is not known to the users in case... | ||
* you really need a way that is superior to the standard-way | * ...you really need a way that is superior to the standard-way | ||
* you carefully crafted such a way | * ...you carefully crafted such a way | ||
* | * ...and you tested it to ensure that it works like intended. | ||
This is often done for a good reason in applications like 3D Modelling Environments. These applications 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 lear 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. | |||
Your application should be as well | |||
==Visibility== | ==Visibility== | ||