Video link: Essential Design Principles

The Principles:

1. Wayfinding
   • Help people to orient themselves
2. Feedback
   • Answer people’s unasked questions
3. Visibility
   • The usability is greatly improved when feedback and controls are clearly visible

• Has to be weighed against other considerations, such as clutter

1. Consistency
   • Representing similar design features in similar ways
   • Inconsistency undermines usability
2. Mental model
   • Oversimplifications of how systems should work, developed from personal experience so everyone’s is unique.
   • How things work and how things should react to interactions
   • When a system matches out mental model, we subconsciously percieve it as inuitive
   • When a system does not match our mental model, we notice it is unintuitive
3. Proximity
   • Distance between control and objects it affects.
4. Grouping
   • Similar controls are close togeather
5. Mapping
   • How controls are arranged relative to each other.
   • Controls resemble what they affect.
6. Affordance
   • Visual and tactile cues a control affords to us.
   • Progressive disclosure
     • Technique for managing complexity.
     • Gradually eases from simple to more complex
   • Hiding away complexity so people can make quick actions with no distractions.
7. 80/20 Rule
   • 80% of systems effects come from 20% of it’s pauses
   • Not all functionality is used. The least used functionality should be hidden to allow more space for the most used features.
   • It reduces clutter and simplifies decision making
8. Symmetry
   • Reflectional, transational and rotational symmetry.
   • Gives sense of order and balance

Good examples of Essential Design Principles

Apollo

• I’ve used Apollo for a while even though there are plenty of other Reddit clients for iPhone. I keep coming back to Apollo because of how consistent it is with Apple’s design guidelines.
• Apollo has a great grouping. The upvote and downvote buttons are near each other, it’s very consistent with other iOS apps, has great wayfinding in the way of back buttons and tabs, and it hides complexity but allows experienced users to get the comples actions through gestures.

Spotify

• Spotify on iOS is a way better experience than Spotify on Android.
• Spotify uses grouping very effectively. The song currently playing shows up at the bottom, along with controls to play/pause and skip tracks. The wayfinding is also intuitive and allows users to get back to the home page very quickly.
• Spotify also manages complexity well by the use of gestures. Being able to queue songs by swiping right is very effectively.

Transit

• I use this app daily in order to check bus times around Boulder.
• This app has great visibility and affordance. You can see all the information you could want from a public transit app right away which saves a lot of time, but not too much that it gets distracted.

TikTok

• Since TikTok is mainly video-based, it can be easy to make the app feel cluttered but the app does a good job of having full video but not covering it up.
• The app has good grouping. The options to subscribe, like , comment and share are all right next to each other so you know they all relate to the current video on screen. The bottom area of the app allows users to navigate across pages.