• When the user is focused on their objective and not on the actual interface itself
• Invisible (user only pay attention to something intuitive when it’s actually not intuitive. What makes something intuitive is actually something personal. We have to know something about the people we are building for
• When Current Knowledge and Target Knowledge are at the same place. There are two ways to accomplish this: Raise Current Knowledge to meet Target Knowledge (Training), or reduce Target Knowledge to meet Current Knowledge (Simplifying)
• Is all about focuses on experience. Trend/ Pattern we see over and over again: Technology > Features > Experience
• Is a result of constant team critique, and critiques are essential to creating intuitive designs.

Do you want to find out what those words are? Start by asking them. Visiting your users in their natural environments is probably the best way to start.

Jarred’s team found that personas are a great way to communicate trigger words to everyone on the design team. A persona is a detailed description of a user the team wants to ensure is successful on the site. Listing, within the persona, the trigger words that person would use helps us, the designers, understand how the users’ own language will impact the final design.

According to Jarred, his team never conducted a usability test that didn’t yield tremendous insight into how users react to the links the team is using. It becomes obvious immediately when links are missing the clues the users need to go forward.

This powerful trio — field studies, personas, and usability testing — are a great way to start identifying the trigger words that work for your users.

1. Responsive and intuitive page elements
2. Branding and consistency of theme.

Focusing on these two things will give every pixel in a design a purpose and will contribute to the website’s overall usability. Sure, eye candy is important, but it isn’t everything, and that for a design to be truly beautiful, it has to be functional, have purpose and contribute in some way to the website’s intuitiveness, usefulness and branding. All of these things contribute to the overall effect of a design.

Tufte’s initial work will be on the recovery.gov website, which is the primary way the board will conduct business transparently to the American public.

Wonder if he brought his own litter of kittens, or will be borrowing them from DC shelters…?

From the book The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman.

I think rules #4 “Make your site’s goal obvious”, #5 “Navigation should be easy to figure out”, #7 “Don’t put animation in the way of your content” and #9 “Don’t have a splash/landing page” can be broken for personal portfolio or some entertainment sites, where a more creative approach might be appropriate, but not so much for e-commerce, news or corporate sites.

#6 “Use different colors for the text and background” should be “Use Contrast between Text and Background”, not different colors. Most of the examples here use variations of the base color, and use contrast to make the text readable, just like it supposed to be.

#8 “Stick to web-safe fonts”: I’m getting into using Cufon and Typeface.js (I used it for 2 projects), they offer a great solution in terms of progressive enhancement (better than sIFR), and think this is one area where the old rules no longer apply.

I also liked the tables joke and the tone it sets to encourage designers not to be so serious all the time!

Checkout the story of redesign of the ubiquitous prescription bottle led by Deborah Adler

I really enjoyed the article’s approach to guiding the reader through the process, and the result is stunning…Just far enough out of the box to be a real improvement, but not so unfamiliar as to make it un-marketable.

I don’t see a mention of this in the article, but judging from the bottles’ shape they can be packed more tightly to save shipping space and costs, as well.

You can see Debora Adler speak at Microsoft Mixx 09 Day 2 Keynote. (fast forward to 30:30)

Neat visual nav at Stylous.com. Check it out in action to see how it works.

• Apple Human Interface Guidelines
• iPhone Human Interface Guidelines
• Windows Vista UX Guidelines
• Windows XP Design Guidelines
• Nokia UI Style/Visual Guidelines
• GNOME Human Interface Guidelines 2.2
• KDE 4.0 Visual Guide
• Java Look and Feel Design Guidelines
• Comcast Style Guide
• Usability.gov Research-Based Web Design and Usability Guidelines
• Writing an Interface Style Guide

- Donald Norman, author of “The Design of Everyday Things”