Siolon

Objectives in User Interface Design II

I just came across a fan­tas­tic doc­u­ment pub­lished very recently from the W3C that talks about “best prac­tices” in web design. The doc­u­ment is called “HTML Design Prin­ci­ples,” and I believe it con­tained a few things that I left out of my last list.

Inter­na­tion­al­iza­tion

Under the head­ing of “Sup­port World Lan­guages” is the topic of inter­na­tion­al­iza­tion. This is extremely impor­tant espe­cially if you want your product/application to be usable by the vast major­ity of the mod­ern world! This doesn’t mean that you need to trans­late into every lan­guage, but there are cer­tain prin­ci­ples such (as men­tioned) sup­port­ing Uni­code to allow for translation.

For you Word­Press users I just saw a plu­gin come through my RSS reader called the “Word­Press Global Trans­la­tor Plu­gin” which looks excit­ing and very prac­ti­cal for Word­Press sites with an inter­na­tional pres­ence (which is, truly, every site).

Secu­rity

While this is only alluded to under “Secure By Design” it is an impor­tant topic. The arti­cle speaks specif­i­cally to the com­mu­ni­ca­tion between con­tent from dif­fer­ent sites.

“Com­mu­ni­cat­ing between doc­u­ments from dif­fer­ent sites is use­ful, but an unre­stricted ver­sion could put user data at risk. Cross-document mes­sag­ing is designed to allow this with­out vio­lat­ing secu­rity constraints.”

While secu­rity is often thought of in terms of hack­ing, SQL/script injec­tion, etc. the user inter­face is the medium which is exposed to these vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties. Be sure to pro­tect you and your users when design­ing your interface.

Exten­sion On “Usability”

While I men­tioned the topic of usabil­ity in my last list, this W3C list talks about “util­ity” which is ensur­ing that your appli­ca­tion solves real-world prob­lems. There is an aspect to usabil­ity to ensure that the appli­ca­tion is in fact usable (not overly com­plex which the W3C men­tions as well), but usabil­ity means it must return to me some mea­sure of value. Return on invest­ment (ROI) takes on an intan­gi­ble form when speak­ing of the use­ful­ness of web appli­ca­tions (as is the pop­u­lar idiom: “there’s no such thing as a free lunch” speak­ing to oppor­tu­nity cost).

In Sum­mary

I was encour­aged to dis­cover this list shortly after my last post, and it pro­vided valu­able insight to con­tinue round­ing out this list. I’m think­ing of putting the ideas together into a short pam­phlet. We’ll see what time allows.