Dec 3rd, 2007
User Interface Improvements: Assistance
In this post I continue writing about some simple practices that will help you quickly improve your software GUI. In the first post I wrote how to position your GUI elements properly. Before I started to write this post I had been thinking how to name it. I’m not writing a comprehensive guide on usability and user interface design. I’m simply writing my observations and thoughts about some practical aspects of GUI design. It’s hard to divide my advice into exact categories with distinct names. I named this post “Assistance”, because I will write about some tricks that will assist users to feel comfortable with your software.
When user works with your software he needs just a limited set of essential functions and, in the same time, he wishes all important functions to be easily accessible. Therefore, as a designer you must keep minimal both the number of visible functional elements and the number of mouse clicks or key pressings to perform an action. Let’s look at the examples.
