Tim Berners-Lee
Architectural and philosophical points
These statements of architectural principle explain the thinking behind the specifications. These are personal notes by Tim Berners-Lee: they are not endorsed by W3C. They are aimed at the technical community, to explain reasons, provide a framework to provide consistency for for future developments, and avoid repetition of discussions once resolved.
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Simplicity
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Modular Design
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Being part of a Modular Design
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Tolerance
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Decentralization
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Test of Independent Invention
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Principle of Least Power
Bert Bos
Why doesn’t HTML include tags for style? Why can’t you put text inside SMIL? Why doesn’t CSS include commands to transform a document? Why, in short, does W3C modularize its specification and why in this particular way? This essay tries to make explicit what the developers in the various W3C working groups mean when they invoke words like efficiency, maintainability, accessibility, extensibility, learnability, simplicity, longevity, and other long words ending in -y.
An essay on W3C’s design principles
Dieter Rams
Ten principles for good design
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Good design is innovative
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Good design makes a product useful
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Good design is aesthetic
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Good design makes a product understandable
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Good design is unobtrusive
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Good design is honest
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Good design is long-lasting
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Good design is thorough down to the last detail
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Good design is environmentally friendly
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Good design is as little design as possible
Evan Williams
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Be narrow
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Be different
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Be casual
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Be picky
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Be user-centric
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Be self-centered
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Be greedy
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Be tiny
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Be agile
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Be balanced
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(bonus!) Be wary
Bruce Tognazzini
First Principles of Interaction Design
The following principles are fundamental to the design and implementation of effective interfaces, whether for traditional GUI environments or the web. Of late, many web applications have reflected a lack of understanding of many of these principles of interaction design, to their great detriment. Because an application or service appears on the web, the principles do not change. If anything, applying these principles become even more important.
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Aesthetics
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Anticipation
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Autonomy
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Color Blindness
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Consistency
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Defaults
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Efficiency of the User
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Explorable Interfaces
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Fitts’ Law
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Human Interface Objects
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Latency Reduction
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Learnability
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Metaphors
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Protect Users’ Work
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Readability
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Track State
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Visible Navigation
Joshua Porter
Principles of User Interface Design
Interfaces exist to enable interaction between humans and our world. They can help clarify, illuminate, enable, show relationships, bring us together, pull us apart, manage our expectations, and give us access to services. The act of designing interfaces is not art and they are not monuments unto themselves. Interfaces do a job and their effectiveness can be measured. They are not just utilitarian, however. The best interfaces can inspire, evoke, mystify, and intensify our relationship with the world.
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Clarity is job #1
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Interfaces exist to enable interaction
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Conserve attention at all costs
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Keep users in control
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Direct manipulation is best
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One primary action per screen
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Keep secondary actions secondary
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Provide a natural next step
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Appearance follows behavior (aka form follows function)
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Consistency matters
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Strong visual hierarchies work best
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Smart organization reduces cognitive load
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Highlight, don’t determine, with color
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Progressive disclosure
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Help people inline
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A crucial moment: the zero state
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Existing problems are most valuable
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Great design is invisible
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Build on other design disciplines
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Interfaces exist to be used
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Usefulness is job #1
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The experience is the product
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Solve existing problems
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Look for investment
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Model features on real artifacts
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Fit and finish matter
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Release quality sets expectations
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Release a smaller, better product
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The last 10% is the hardest
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Know who your real competitors are
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Actual vs desired use
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Personal value precedes social value
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Users are not product designers
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The behavior you’re seeing is the behavior you’ve designed for
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Great products are focused on a single problem
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Disruptive products look like toys
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Positioning is crucial
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Product/market fit is when people sell for you
Sandi Wassmer
The Ten Principles of Inclusive Web Design
Inclusive Design is where innovation and imagination flourish. Meeting the needs of the widest variety of people does not inhibit creativity. It opens our minds and inspires excellence.
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Equitable: Be welcoming.
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Flexible: Provide options.
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Straightforward: Be obvious and not ambiguous.
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Perceptible: Don’t assume anything.
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Informative: Be timely, predictable, uncomplicated and precise.
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Preventative: Provide easy to follow instructions and gently guide users.
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Tolerant: Handle errors respectfully.
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Effortless: Don’t make demands or place restrictions on your users.
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Accommodating: Be approachable, uncluttered and give people room to manoeuvre.
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Consistent: Follow standards, guidelines, conventions and best practices.
Paul Robert Lloyd
We can start the work of building this framework, by agreeing upon a set design principles, each working in service of a broader goal, that of building a web that is and remains accessible to all.
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Start from the point of greatest adaptability.
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Reflect the diversity of users within our practice.
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Build using systems that can be reasoned with.
Massimo Vignelli
Creativity needs the support of knowledge to be able to perform at its best. It is not the intention of this little book to stifle creativity or to reduce it to a bunch of rules. It is not the formula that prevents good design from happening but lack of knowledge of the complexity of the Design profession. It’s up to the brain to use the proper formula to achieve the desired result.
Part One: The Intangibles
- Semantics
- Syntactics
- Pragmatics
- Discipline
- Appropriateness
- Ambiguity
- Design is One
- Visual Power
- Intellectual Elegance
- Timelessness
- Responsibility
- Equity
Part Two: The Tangibles
- Paper Sizes
- Grids, Margins, Columns and Modules
- A Company Letterhead
- Grids for Books
- Typefaces, The Basic Ones
- Flush left, centered, justified
- Type Size Relationships
- Rulers
- Contrasting Type Sizes
- Scale
- Texture
- Color
- Layouts
- Sequence
- Binding
- Indentity and Diversity
- White Space
- A collection of experiences
Willem Sandberg
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A poster has to be joyous, unless it has to arouse compassion.
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Red has to be in every poster.
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A poster has to provoke a closer look, otherwise it doesn’t endure.
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With a respect for society, designer and director both are responsible for the street scene. A poster does not only have to revive the street, it also has to be human.
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Every poster has to be an artwork.
Heydon Pickering
What the Heck Is Inclusive Design?
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Involve code early
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Respect conventions
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Don’t be exact
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Enforce simplicity
Jens Meiert
Dave Winer
Manifesto: Rules for standards-makers
If we work together on a project based on open tech, these are the principles I will try to stick to.
- Interop is all that matters
- There are tradeoffs in standards
- Software matters more than formats (much)
- Users matter even more than software
- One way is better than two
- Fewer formats is better
- Fewer format features is better
- Perfection is a waste of time
- Write specs in plain English
- Explain the curiosities
- If practice deviates from the spec, change the spec
- No breakage
- Freeze the spec
- Keep it simple
- Developers are busy
- Mail lists don’t rule
- Praise developers who make it easy to interop
Josh Clark
Design in the era of the algorithm
Here are ten design principles for conceiving, designing, and managing data-driven products.
Lou Downe
15 principles of good service design
So, in the absence of anything else, here are 15 principles of what makes a good service. They’re based on years of working on bad services, and trying to build good ones.
A good service must…
- Enable a user to complete the outcome they set out to do
- Be easy to find
- Clearly explain its purpose
- Set the expectations a user has of it
- Be agnostic of organizational structures
- Require the minimum possible steps to complete
- Be consistent throughout
- Have no dead ends
- Be usable by everyone equally
- Respond to change quickly
- Work in a way that is familiar
- Encourage the right behaviour from users and staff
- Clearly explain why a decision has been made
- Make it easy to get human assistance
- Require no prior knowledge to use
Brian Eno
Design principles for the streets
Several of the principles were immediately useful, and put straight into practice; they either reinforced an earlier thought or opened up entirely new vistas. Several others are unfurling as we go. A few more are more broadly relevant, well beyond our street-oriented agenda. Here they are:
- Think like a gardener, not an architect: design beginnings, not endings
- Unfinished = fertile
- Artists are to cities what worms are to soil.
- A city’s waste should be on public display.
- Make places that are easy for people to change and adapt (wood and plaster, as opposed to steel and concrete.)
- Places which accommodate the very young and the very old are loved by everybody else too.
- Low rent = high life
- Make places for people to look at each other, to show off to each other.
- Shared public space is the crucible of community.
- A really smart city is the one that harnesses the intelligence and creativity of its inhabitants.