1. Speak users’ language.

   Description: Interfaces should use the users' language, with words,

phrases, and concepts familiar to the user and follow the real-world

convention.

   Why: System-oriented terms which users don't understand make

users feel unsure and ignored and may force them to go elsewhere to find

explanation even to complete the task.

   How:

   • Avoid technical jargon and product internals.

   • Use words, phrases, and concepts that are intuitive and familiar to users.

2. Ensure consistency and standardization.

   Description: Keep consistency and follow the same standards in the

same UI, across different UIs within the same product, and among similar

products in the same offering.

   Why:

  • Meet user expectations to build confidence and feel mastery over the interface.

   • User can transfer their knowledge from their experiences with other product to lower learning curve.

   • Maintain consistency to provide consistent user experience and strengthen the brand image.

   How:

   • Uses terms and UI labels consistently. 

   • Set up a term repository or a UI label repository.

   • Keep UI text in a consistent outlook, such as font, size, highlighting, capitalization, etc.

3. Keep minimalist content (Less is more).

   Description: Keep only necessary and relevant information to support

primary goals.

   Why:

   Users do not go to a user interface to read the content, but to complete tasks and achieve their user goals. Each unit of information on he UI is supposed to serve a purpose and add values to the overall user experience.

   Unnecessary elements distract users from the information that they truly need and prevent them from achieving their goals.

   How:

   • Provide only the information that is really needed by users to complete the task on the UI, and provide it only when and where users need it.

   • Eliminate wordiness, and remove redundancy.

   • Usability testing should include the check whether the content provided is really needed by users and whether any critical information is missing.

4. Indicate system status and users' progress.

   Description: Keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within reasonable time.

  Why:

  • Users need to know what actions are available, how the system responded, where they are, and how to go to where they need on the UI.

  • Sufficient and immediate feedback reduces uncertainty, allows users to feel in control, and leads to better decision making.

  • Predictable interactions build trust in product and benefit brand ultimately.

  How:

 • Use components like breadcrumbs, progress indicators, pagination, etc. to provide a visual representation of users' position or progress.

 • Provide important and immediate feedback for interactive events.

 • Show what actions are available and not available at the current time.

5. User control and freedom.

   Description: Provide a clear way for users to reverse their actions and return to the system's previous state where the end results is not what they wanted or expected.

  Why:

  • User often perform actions by mistake or change their minds. 

  • The ability to easily get out of trouble provide users with more confidence to explore and learn the platform quickly and easily

  How:

 • Provide users obvious options to easily revert actions.

 • Allow users freedom in the flow. Users should have the freedom to jump to any step to correct their options.

  • Present users with explanation and options in double confirmation.

6. Provide tailored information to different types of users.

   Description: Provide different types of information based on the needs and objectives of different types of users.  Offer onboarding tutorial or kits for novice users to give them a general picture of how the system works and support shortcuts and accelerators to speed up the interaction for frequent users.

Why:

New users often require guidance when using a system and need clear and obvious options because they have not yet developed a mental model of how the system works. 

Frequent users are often familiar with the system and they need shortcuts or accelerator to help them accomplish the task more efficiently.

 How:

 • Support new users to get up to speed with onboarding instructions and starting kits. Provide frequent users with exits of the basic tutorials. Offer frequent users with ways of shortcuts and customization. Offer different entry points for different user groups. 

 • Prioritize and personalize the display order and format. Highlight, left-load, or help users automate frequently used functions to maximize efficiency.

7. Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors.

  Description: Write error messages that help users recognize and diagnose the problem and provide guidance that can educate users to recover from the error .

  Why:

  Understand what has gone wrong and convey the status and specifics to users. 

  Offer solutions to help users fix the errors by themselves timely and educate users along the way.

  Avoid calling for support and reduce effort and cost.

  How:

  • Choose the appropriate message modalities, and place them in the right places. 

  • Explain the cause of error.

  • Avoid blaming users.

  • Provide the solution.

8. Balance between UI content and documentation.

   Description: Balance the information placed on the UI and documentation based on the size, complexity , relevance and frequency of

use of information, and keep them up to date and match each other.

  Why:

  • Help users complete their tasks quickly and easily through the appropriate information in UI and documentation

  • Reduce extra efforts to locate or search for the target information.

  How:

  • Don't stack all the information on the UI, but provide necessary information.

  •  Keep consistency between UI content and documentation.

  • Documentation should not simply repeat UI details but focus on user goals.

  • Determine the documentation modality: embedded or external.

9.  Improvement solutions:

UI designers: Learn and follow the UI content design principles。Follow the UI content review process. Work out consistent formats that can be used across the whole UI.

Content designers: content designing to make the contents user-friendly. Do usability test from users’ perspective. Avoid reviewing only the words and sentences. Check whether you can use the UI to finish tasks without any blockers. Improve the UI review process.

Testers: Review the contents in the UI to see whether there are blockers, such as missing critical contents and redundant contents, instead of testing only the functions based on docs.