I covered the more personal things on the ‘About Me’ page, but I want to share my professional guiding principles and philosophy. There’s really nothing radical about this stuff, but these are the ideas behind my ideas.

Most of it is informed / inspired by the seminal [to me] 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design by Jakob Nielsen. Almost all of these practices are in service of reducing cognitive burden for users.

  1. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should
  2. Let users know what’s going on, e.g. if an action takes some time, such as an export, let a user know with a spinner or something
  3. Try to avoid doing two things at once, e.g. a Save button should not exit a page; it should save the content
  4. Help prevent users from making mistakes
  5. If they make an error, let them know what they did and how to fix it
  6. Having too many choices stresses people out
  7. Don’t try to redefine familiar symbols
  8. Make sure everyone’s solving the same problem
  9. Speaking of problems, it doesn’t hurt to ask “Is this a real problem or a made-up problem?”
  10. Most people won’t learn badly designed, complex apps — they’ll just avoid using them

I could keep going, but this would be more fun one-on-one, no?