Do you have a design book that you find yourself referring to over and over again? I have a few of them, but recently, one in particular is proving to be the first resource that I reference for further validation of my design ideas and pointers to seminal design research findings. It also provides me with a healthy dose of appreciation for the pervasive design influences that are well at work in the world around us.
Universal Principles of Design by William Lidwell, Kritina Holden and Jill Butler delivers on its promise to provide us with “125 Ways to Enhance Usability, Influence Perception, Increase Appeal, Make Better Design Decisions, and Teach Through Design.” Sure enough, this book hits the User Experience designer’s sweet spot, with definitions, descriptions, examples and recommendations for the implementation (or avoidance) of each of the 125 design principles.
Because I am an advocate of learning by doing, through 2010 I hope to dedicate a blog post to each of these principles. My goal is to not only to share their importance with you, my readers, but also to deepen our understanding of each principle as it applies to User Experience. After spending hours with this book, I know that each of these principles can improve our decision-making as we frame user experiences.
Because there are 125 principles, I am going to break the batches into five batches of 25. Here is batch #1:
- Accessibility
- Baby Face Bias
- The Biophilia Effect
- The Cathedral Effect
- Classical Conditioning
- Confirmation
- Desire Line
- Five Hat Racks
- Flexibility-Usability Tradeoff
- Forgiveness
- Framing
- Hierarchy of Needs
- Horror Vacui
- Inattentional Blindness
- Layering
- Legibility
- Normal Distribution
- Operant Conditioning
- Picture Superiority Effect
- Progressive Disclosure
- Redundancy
- Scarcity
- Uncanny Valley
- Waist-to-Hip Ratio
- buy this book. I promise it will serve as more of a design tool than it will take up space on your bookshelf (and it will help you win design arguments, FTW).
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