GUI design techniques to enhance user experience
- by aku
What techniques do you know\use to create user-friendly GUI ?
I can name following techniques that I find especially useful:
Non-blocking notifications (floating dialogs like in Firefox3 or Vista's pop-up messages in tray area)
Absence of "Save" button
MS OneNote as an example.
IM clients can save conversation history automatically
Integrated search
Search not only through help files but rather make UI elements searchable.
Vista made a good step toward such GUI.
Scout addin Microsoft Office was a really great idea.
Context oriented UI (Ribbon bar in MS Office 2007)
Do you implement something like listed techniques in your software?
Edit:
As Ryan P mentioned, one of the best way to create usable app is to put yourself in user's place. I totally agree with it, but what I want to see in this topic is specific techniques (like those I mentioned above) rather than general recommendations.
