Interaction Design

Jennifer Tidwell is the author of the O'Reilly book "Designing Interfaces", and author of a couple of websites: designinginterfaces.com and the older and soon retiring UI Patterns and Techniques site. Reading her stuff is fun because you suddenly get names for all of the user interface elements and experiences you've been having interacting with all of your life (or half of it, for some of us). I just like reading her work and gaining that clarity through labeling my experience. I love what she said (my notes are older, and she may have updated it) about user interfaces for "Navigable Spaces like the web and related technologies. She reckon(s/ed) that Navigable Spaces usually need to supply users with:

- "Map" views of navigable spaces
- Clear Entry Points
- The ability to Go Back One Step
- Some kind of "home" page or base state which allows users to Go Back To A Safe Place
- Some way of recording an Interaction History
- Progress Indicators (e.g. breadcrumbs)
- Bookmarks
- User Annotations
- Pointers that signal the user about what kind of actions they can take (like when an arrow cursor turns into a finger cursor when mouseover on a list)
- Short Descriptions of nodes that save the user from having to take on too much info at once (search engines serve this up for us)
- Disabled Irrelevant Things that can be cleared away if necessary
- Optional Detail on Demand
- Easy icons to aggregate Convenient Environment Actions
- Good Defaults

That's it. I just think it's cool to have names for stuff like that...