On The Durability Of Usability Guidelines

Ant writes "Useit.com's Durability of Usability Guidelines article says about 90% of usability guidelines from 1986 are still valid. However, several guidelines are less important because they relate to design elements that are rarely used today... The 944 guidelines related to military command and control systems built in the 1970s and early 1980s; most used mainframe technology. You might think that these old findings would be completely irrelevant to today's user interface designers. If so, you'd be wrong."

Comments

Another good set of guidelines to follow

[Alioth]

Something that's a lot shorter and easier to remember and incredibly useful today (despite having been around quite a while) are Shniederman's 8 Golden Rules of UI design.

Obligatory linkage:
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/almstrum/cs370/elvi sino/rules.html

Usability

[CastrTroy]

I was lucky enough to have UI design class forced upon me in my University studies. I think that everyone taking a degree in computer science (I took Software engineering) should have to take this course. Despite the fact that my professor was pretty bad, I still learned a lot of useful things from that class.

Re:Related: commands and error messages

[NaDrew]

Since you can't copy and paste from an error dialog, what exactly was the error message? (Aside: I hate GNOME, but damned if they didn't get this right: popup error dialogs are copyable as text).

In Windows XP, error messages are copy-and-pastable as text. I don't know when this first appeared, but it's available now.