Here's some rules that almost every designer I know ignores:
1) Map out your interface and interaction trees first
1-click - most common actions
2-clicks - second most common actions
3-clicks - power user level stuff
Put the most commonly used stuff at 1-click or interaction. If you don't know what goes at 2 and 3 clicks in, you don't understand how the application is used, because you don't understand what the most common interactions are. If you've run out of room for the 1-click stuff in your UI, then your UI concept is poorly designed. Keep iterating and collecting information until you can fulfill this.
Don't put anything at more than 3 clicks in.
2) Double the number of interaction points in the UI. Assume the application will grow and add features. If you optimize your design for the number of features you have today, you'll have no where to put all the stuff you're going to get over the application lifetime and it'll all just end up getting buried in menus. I've seen lots of gorgeously, carefully, designed applications die a year in because of this.
Double everything and see if that number of interaction points still fits within your concept, that way the interface has room to grow without getting messy.
3) Don't make your users interpret, make them understand.
If your concerned about how universally an icon is interpreted across cultures, you're doing it wrong. Interpretation is an additional step your users have to go through to use your UI, it's like putting everything at 2, 3 and 4 clicks in because they now have to not only look and scan the UI for what they want, they need to figure out what each interface item means before they can interact with it.
Even worse, as they grow to become accustomed to your UI, they're going to end up memorizing location and placement of options because the interface widgets take too long to interpret. Get 2 revisions down the road and you move a button and wham your tech support calls jump 50% because the users never bothered to remember what the symbol for their action looked like, just where it was on the screen.
4) Everything must be discoverable. This is why the world moved to GUIs from CLIs. Don't make your users play a 1990's era adventure game where they have to click every pixel on the screen to see if they can advance their usage. The Flat UI trend is notorious for this.
5) Consistency rules. Also see #3.
6) Eliminate Steps. Map out how many steps certain actions are. Cut them down to as few as possible. I remember one time going through a file import process with a tool, by the time you got the file imported the user had to navigate 27 different steps! Almost every step required minimal or no user input. Nobody had ever bothered to map out the interaction patterns in the tool before but users were constantly complaining about how difficult it was to use.
We reworked the workflow and got it down to 3 steps and user-engagement jumped triple digits.
A power user is someone that will go through the effort of learning a wide array of keyboard shortcuts to gain maximum efficiency when using your product.
What op described for 3 clicks is simply for rarely used use cases. Not power users.
>A power user is someone that will go through the effort of learning a wide array of keyboard shortcuts to gain maximum efficiency when using your product.
No, a power user has nothing to do with "keyboard shortcuts" -- it's about delving deeper into more advanced features of a product regularly.
(Keyboard shortcuts in fact can be less efficient in some case and just busy-work for your mind compared to direct manipulation with the mouse).
>No, a power user has nothing to do with "keyboard shortcuts" -- it's about delving deeper into more advanced features of a product regularly.
MY point was that a power user would be the person to learn the most efficient way of using your product. Having a feature that is three clicks in would annoy a power user. Three clicks is for something that simply wont be used often
Forgive my terrible maths, but doesn't that provide for 512 maximum functions? If your interface needs more than that, I'd argue it's time to reevaluate its scope.
That advice stems from the fact that most humans can remember ~7 items in short term memory. It got then mixed up with menu items. The argumentation is that only this way user can remember immediately after seeing the menu what was in it.
But that ignores that user can open the menu again, they don't have to use the short term memory, and long term memory is not limited that way.
Probably still sometimes a good idea to use that advice just to evade letting the menus get too cramped, but other than that, it is better to ignore this advice.
1) Map out your interface and interaction trees first
1-click - most common actions
2-clicks - second most common actions
3-clicks - power user level stuff
Put the most commonly used stuff at 1-click or interaction. If you don't know what goes at 2 and 3 clicks in, you don't understand how the application is used, because you don't understand what the most common interactions are. If you've run out of room for the 1-click stuff in your UI, then your UI concept is poorly designed. Keep iterating and collecting information until you can fulfill this.
Don't put anything at more than 3 clicks in.
2) Double the number of interaction points in the UI. Assume the application will grow and add features. If you optimize your design for the number of features you have today, you'll have no where to put all the stuff you're going to get over the application lifetime and it'll all just end up getting buried in menus. I've seen lots of gorgeously, carefully, designed applications die a year in because of this.
Double everything and see if that number of interaction points still fits within your concept, that way the interface has room to grow without getting messy.
3) Don't make your users interpret, make them understand.
If your concerned about how universally an icon is interpreted across cultures, you're doing it wrong. Interpretation is an additional step your users have to go through to use your UI, it's like putting everything at 2, 3 and 4 clicks in because they now have to not only look and scan the UI for what they want, they need to figure out what each interface item means before they can interact with it.
Even worse, as they grow to become accustomed to your UI, they're going to end up memorizing location and placement of options because the interface widgets take too long to interpret. Get 2 revisions down the road and you move a button and wham your tech support calls jump 50% because the users never bothered to remember what the symbol for their action looked like, just where it was on the screen.
4) Everything must be discoverable. This is why the world moved to GUIs from CLIs. Don't make your users play a 1990's era adventure game where they have to click every pixel on the screen to see if they can advance their usage. The Flat UI trend is notorious for this.
5) Consistency rules. Also see #3.
6) Eliminate Steps. Map out how many steps certain actions are. Cut them down to as few as possible. I remember one time going through a file import process with a tool, by the time you got the file imported the user had to navigate 27 different steps! Almost every step required minimal or no user input. Nobody had ever bothered to map out the interaction patterns in the tool before but users were constantly complaining about how difficult it was to use.
We reworked the workflow and got it down to 3 steps and user-engagement jumped triple digits.
6) After you've addressed 1-6, make it look nice.