Users and interfaces

Cognition

Did you know that when a user interprets an interface, the user's memory only holds 7 (+2 or -2) elements in the short-term memory? In short, if there is a navigational menu on a webpage with over nine elements, the user loses focus and has to iterate through the menu every time when looking for an element.

36272927 or 362-729-27, which one is easier to interpret and perhaps, remember? The latter. Here, by hyphenating the numbers, the information has been 'chunked', resulting in easy interpretation of the information presented.

All these simple factors have to be considered when designing an interface. Implicitly, these contribute to fast and efficient working times and an experience that pleases the end user.

Perception & Affordance

The amount of text on an interface, the positioning of elements, colors, size of elements, all these factors have to be taken into consideration when designing a user interface. Users are impatient, its the job of the user interface to manage to retain the user's attention without creating an annoyance.

Every element on a user interface should be self explanatory. The concept of affordance takes into the nature of elements and the insight they provide to a user about themselves. For example, a clickable graphical icon on a user interface should be able to explain its function to the user, without leaving the user to wonder what it does or conduct a 'trial and error'.

Summing up: RichMint

It wouldn't be difficult to assume that a user might not have had the patience to go through all the text on this page. Bad design?

RichMint can analyse, test and evaluate your application's user interface and give you a detailed report clearly highlighting every aspect of the design, in most of the cases, suggesting design improvements and changes.

The clients area offers sample designs, reports and more information on our services.