In this segment, we're going to look at Interface Conventions, and an easy way to do this is to take a very basic interface, for instance our keypad, and try and use that to examine something more complicated, because even the simple keypad, the interactions with it are a lot more complex than they seem. From these basic interactions, we can pull out a set of rules or ideas about how user interface should work and a lot of UI UX designers online will have their top 10 tips for things that UI designer should look at. So, here are some of mine. We're going to take this list and examine them one at a time and see how they work when applied to even a very simple interface like the keypad but we could take those ideas and also think about how they might work with something much more complicated. So first of all, let's look at real world knowledge. Real world knowledge is based on analog models. Early interfaces were clearly based on these real world models, where there were simulations of physical things and objects that existed in the real world. It's less so with contemporary interfaces, but some of that vocabulary still lingers on. We still talk about buttons and menus for example, that are physical things. With our keypad for instance, we recognize digital buttons because we've experienced buttons in the real world, so we have an idea about how they're going to work. And this brings us on to our next topic which is learned behavior or conventions because we already know how interface elements work. For instance the button, even though this is a flat representation on the screen rather than being physical, we draw a correlation between how the button works in the real world and then knowing how the button is going to work in the digital world. Cause and effect looks at action and reaction. When we press a button, we know that something is going to happen, we have an expectation already about how it works. Often the thing that happens is going to happen somewhere else but if that button is combined with words or numbers or symbols that are associated with it, then we have an expectation of what the button is going to do, of what's actually going to happen when we press it. Consistency, looks at a logical or systematic approach to design. If our buttons look the same, then they should act in a similar or systematic way. If you press one button and you learn how it works, then you have a pretty good idea about how the next button is going to work. Button shouldn't look the same but then work in a different way. We're really trying to figure out a consistent system, so if we know we press this button that is a "one," when we press the "eight" button, we know that the "eight" is going to work in the same way. Interactions should be seamless, it should be fast and it should be easy, it should be as few steps as possible when you're asking a user to interact with something. When you interact with an interface, you want immediate results without delay. You want whatever you want to happen and you want it to happen now. There's nothing worse than clicking or tapping and nothing happening. It breeds frustration in the user and leads to dissatisfaction with the interface. Immediate intuition, in other words, a few interactions can teach a lot. Once a user learn how a button works, they can intuitively know how a whole set of buttons work. By extension, they might also know how similar digital buttons work even if they're going to look and function in a different way. So, once you've figured out a way of interacting, that way can be applied to a lot of different forms. In other words, if you know how this button works, then you know how old buttons work and of course this is very useful because those kind of things build into interface conventions that are consistent across a lot of platforms. So, if we know how to swipe in one app for instance, we know how to swipe in all apps no matter what kind of thing we're doing with the swiping, whether we're shopping, or going on a date, or ordering food the swipe is always still the same. We only need to learn how to do that once regardless of content or context. Fulfillment, in other words, payoff or results. If we take the time to press a button, to interact with an interface, we expect something to happen. We expect a small sense of gratification or fulfillment. We want to believe that a screen-based digital interaction has real value. If we take the time to press the button, we expect something in return. As a user, it gives us a sense of value with the interface that we're interacting with. It gives us a sense that we're important, that whatever we do, we're going to get something back from the interface itself from our investment. Undo/redo. The user wants to feel safe, to know that if they make a mistake they can nearly always undo or redo it in the digital world. It's a key thing that we love about the digital world as opposed to the real world. In the digital world, we have an ability to undo our actions. If we broke something in a digital experience, we could hit commands in and undo it, and it wouldn't be broken anymore. But if we break something in the real world, in the analog world, it's broken for good. So, we like to know that if we press a button, nothing bad is going to happen. We like to feel safe in that digital environment. It's really important to understand these basic concepts of how interaction works, because they're a foundation to understanding that the blank screen that we start with when we design an interface is not necessarily a blank slate. There are preexisting modes of interacting and preexisting interface conventions that we need to consider. We need to think about what does the user bring to the interface in terms of what the user already knows about how interfaces work, how interaction works. You can't present a user with a totally alien interface every time they're interacting with the different content where they have to learn how to interact in a totally different and new ways. But at the same time, you don't want to give them such a conventional interface that there's nothing interesting or engaging or original about that experience.
