Ben Shneiderman's "Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design"

http://faculty.washington.edu/jtenenbg/courses/360/f04/sessi...

Thanks for the link. Quite good, far more than the blog post. Your link gives concrete, nonobvious clues - like feedback.

We used Shneiderman's "Designing the User Interface" book (3rd Ed) back in Human Computer Interaction class. I kept the book and still use it. The link was a lucky find because the usability post list looked a tiny bit familiar.

I wonder if these rules are worse than useless.

Everyone agrees that "clear" is better than "not-clear", "concise" is better than not concise, etc.

But not only does this blog not give a clear, concise description of how to implement these qualities. It is doesn't even give a clear, unambiguous way to determine whether a given interface has these qualities.

He could have been more concise and just as clear if he'd said "make it rock, dude!"

Anyone who cites any part of Office 2007 as in any way an example of good or effective design has lost my vote of confidence.

I am forced to use it at work, have been using it for nearly two years, and it still takes me 10 or 20 times as long (no exaggeration) to get something done in that as it did in Office 2003 or 2000.

Amazingly bad UI.

The author is citing Office 2007 as an example of how consistency across similar applications is a good thing. Word, Excel, and Powerpoint have consistent interfaces which is a good thing. How usable those interfaces are, on the other hand, is a different question altogether.