Bruce Tognazzini’s article, “First Principles of Interaction Design,” looks at design principles for effective graphical user interfaces (GUI) for web applications and mobile devise apps. The article, highlighting its own usability, is also available in Belorussian, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish, in addition to English.  

The author provides a quick summary.  Effective interfaces are apparent and instill a sense of control in the user, does not get the user involved in inner workings of the system, and perform maximum work with minimum information required from users.

The rest of the is, in effect, a working glossary of terms related to interaction and interface design.  If my highlighting is an indication of anything, the highest density of highlighted sentences exist under the following terms: autonomy (task environment “belongs” to the user); efficiency of the user (focus on user, not system productivity); explorable interfaces (user provided with established routes, allowed to proceed at their own pace); latency reduction (latency, the time lag resulting from performance of a certain action, is pushed to the background); and visible navigation (avoid “invisible” navigation between websites and internet spaces) (Toganazzini, 2003).  

Reference

Tognazzini, B. (2003). First principles of interaction design. Interaction Design Solutions for the Real World, AskTog,