Usability tests of 46 Flash applications identified basic issues related to the ephemeral nature of Web-embedded apps. Some findings restate old truths about GUIs; others reflect the Net's new status as nexus of the user experience.
The Internet is undoing the industrial revolution's emphasis on mass-produced products; now everybody can get exactly what they want. But designing the product you want is hard, and current design interfaces are not good enough for novice designers (i.e., all normal customers).
Instead of making users wander indefinitely and frustratingly around a site looking for something that's just not there, tell them if it lacks a frequently requested feature
Applets are divided into two categories: functionality applets that need to open in a new window and content applets that should stay on the browser page.
Designing for the Web is different from traditional user interface design. Fundamentally, the designer gives up a lot of control to the user - get used to it: WYSIWYG is dead
All usability studies show that fast response times are essential for Web usability: let's believe the data for once! Advice for speeding up sites despite the fact that bandwidth is going down, not up.
How users react to delays in a user interface, whether website or application. The 3 main response time limits are determined by human perceptual abilities.
The concept of direct manipulation is usually viewed as a single characteristic of a class of interaction styles. Here, direct manipulation is analyzed according to a detailed layered interaction model, showing that it has quite different effects on the dialogue on the different levels. In particular, the "no errors" claim may be true at the syntax level but not at several of the levels above or below that level.
Furthermore, a unified framework is presented for conceptualizing Direct Manipulation, What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG), Transparency, Immediate Command Specification, Arcticulatory Directness, and Computational Appliances according to a layered interaction view.
User interface standards can be hard to use for developers. In a laboratory experiment, 26 students achieved only 71% compliance with a two page standard; many violations were due to influence from previous experience with non-standard systems. In a study of a real company's standard, developers were only able to find 4 of 12 deviations in a sample system, and three real products broke between 32% and 55% of the mandatory rules in the standard. Designers were found to rely heavily on the examples in the standard and their experience with other user interfaces.
Thovtrup, H., and Nielsen, J. (1991). Assessing the usability of a user interface standard. Proc. ACM CHI'91 Conf. Human Factors in Computing Systems (New Orleans, LA, 28 April-2 May), 335-341.