| Definitions taken from the book of the same name, by William Lidwell (Rockport) described as 100 ways to enhance usability. It’s a sort of everything you need to know book. |
| ADVANCE ORGANISER |
| An instructional technique that helps people understand new information in terms of what they already know. |
| AFFORDANCE |
| A property in which the physical characteristics of an object or environment influences its function. |
| CHUNKING |
| A technique of combining many units of information into a limited number of units or chunks, so that the information is easier to process or remember. |
| DEFENSIBLE SPACE |
| A space that has territorial markers, opportunities for surveillance and clear indications of activity and ownership. |
| EXPECTATION EFFECT |
| A phenomenon in which perception and behaviour changes as a result of personal expectations or the expectations of others. |
| FIVE HAT RACKS |
| There are five ways to organise information: category, time, location, alphabet and continuum. |
| FRAMING |
| A technique that influences decision making and judgement by manipulating the way information is presented. |
| GUTENBERG DIAGRAM |
| A diagram that describes the general pattern followed by the eyes when looking at evenly distributed, homogeneous information. |
| HICKS LAW |
| The time it takes to make a decision increases as the number of alternatives increases. |
| HIERARCHY |
| Hierarchical organisation is the simplest structure for visualising and understanding complexity. |
| HIERARCHY OF NEEDS |
| In order for a communication or design to be successful it must meet people’s basic needs before it can attempt to satisfy higher-level needs. |
| INVERTED PYRAMID |
| A method of information -presentation in which information is presented in descending order of importance- |
| INTERFERENCE EFFECTS |
| A phenomenon in which mental processing is made slower and less accurate by competing mental processes. |
| ITERATION |
| A process of repeating a set of operations until a specific result is achieved. |
| LAYERING |
| The process of organising information into related groupings in order to manage complexity and reinforce relationships in this information. |
| LAW OF PRAGNANZ |
| A tendency to interpret ambiguous messages as simple and complete, versus complex and incomplete. |
| LIFE CYCLE |
| All products progress sequentially through four stages of existence; introduction, growth, maturity and decline. |
| MAPPING |
| A relationship between controls and their movements or effects. Good mapping between controls and their effects results in greater ease of use. |
| MENTAL MODEL |
| People understand and interact with systems and environments based on mental representations developed from experience. |
| MNEMONIC DEVICE |
| A method of managing system complexity that involves dividing large systems into multiple, smaller self-contained systems. |
| OCKHAM’S RAZOR |
| Given a choice between functionally equivalent designs, the simplest design should be selected |
| OPERANT CONDITIONING |
| A technique used to modify behaviour by reinforcing desired behaviours, and ignoring or punishing undesired behaviours. |
| PERFORMANCE VS PREFERENCE |
| The designs that help people perform optimally are often not the same as the designs that people find most desirable. |
| PERFORMANCE WAD |
| The greater the effort to accomplish a task, the less likely the task will be accomplished successfully. |
| PICTURE SUPERIORITY EFFECT |
| Pictures are remembered better than words. |
| RECOGNITION OVER RECALL |
| Memory for recognising things is better than memory for recalling things. |
| SHAPING |
| A technique used to teach a desired behaviour by reinforcing increasingly accurate approximations of the behaviour. |
| REDUNDANCY |
| The use of more elements than necessary to maintain the performance of a system in the event of failure of one or more of the elements. |
| SIGNAL TO NOISE RATIO |
| The ratio of relevant to irrelevant information in a display. The highest possible signal to noise ratio is desirable in communication and design. |
| ORIENTATION SENSITIVITY |
| A phenomenon of visual processing in which certain line orientations are more quickly and easily processed and discriminated than other line orientations. |
| SATISFICING |
| It is often preferable to settle for a satisfactory solution rather than pursue an optimal solution. |
| STORYTELLING |
| A method of creating imagery, emotions and understanding of events through an interaction between a storyteller and an audience. |
| SCRIPTWRITING |
| A process of putting various unrelated ducks in a row to create the illusion of narrative flow. |
Universal Principles of Design
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