What's in this Guide?
Why a Guide About Simplification?
Today, with the ever growing spread of computers into our daily lives, software application design is more and more focusing on untrained and casual users. These users have very different requirements from professional users who for a long time dominated the business scene. Developers need to take this new breed of users seriously and design applications that do not frustrate them.
"Simplifying for Usability" sets out to help software developers in this effort by proposing a number of "simplification principles" that can be used as guidelines for achieving simple and easy-to-use applications. These guidelines are not specific to a certain technology and can be applied to any user interface design.
Outline of this Guide
This guide starts by explaining what simplification means and what its benefits are. We then take a look at the users, their goals, and requirements. Here, we set out to "kill" some myths about users that have been deliberately told by the software industry. We also list some basic principles from cognitive psychology, which help us to understand how humans process information. This section is supplemented by some practical applications of these principles.
The main section of this guide presents general design principles that help you to develop simple and efficient applications. For each principle, we explain what it actually means for the users and how you can translate these principles into actions within your applications. In order to structure this discussion, we group these principles into the three fundamental categories: simplicity, transparency, and effectiveness.
The last section contains a number of "tips and tricks." Here, we present examples that illustrate how the simplification principles connect to actual design problems.
Status
Version 1.0.1, October 2004: Minor revisions and corrections
This guideline can be found in Resources on the SAP Design Guild Website (www.sapdesignguild.org).
Source: Simplifying for Usability