Notes

Nilsen’s 10 Heuristics (1990)

Visibility of system status

Match between system and the real world

User control and freedom

Consistency and standards

Error prevention

Recognition rather than recall

Flexibility and efficiency of use

Aesthetic and minimalist design

Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors

Help and documentation

Schneiderman’s 8 “Golden Rules” (1987)

Strive for consistency

Enable frequent users to use shortcuts

Cater to universal usability

Offer informative feedback

Design dialog to yield closure

Offer simple error handling

Prevent errors

Permit easy reversal of actions

Support internal locus of control

Reduce short-term memory load

Tog’s First Principles (1978, revised 2014)

Aesthetics

Anticipation

Autonomy

Colour

Consistency

Defaults

connecting ideas

Efficiency of the User

Explorable Interfaces

Fitts’s Law

Human-Interface Objects

Latency Reduction

Learnability

Metaphors

Protect Users’ Work

[Readability](read better)

Simplicity

State Tracking

Visible Navigation

the internet as public space

regulation on how content is consumed, sometimes requests sometimes demands
setting boundaries for your own pages and profiles
- taking lead on how you are treated and how you’d like to interact with the world
- but personal pages on public platforms aren’t actually personal, they’re a shopfront
- often unenforceable boundaries, left to other parties to respect or not, just like in offline world
- muting, blocking, or leaving platforms as direct mechanisms for disapproval
- mechanisms to report to authorities, just like in offline world
- who does and who should be holding any authority over these matters
‘community guidelines’ in eg forums and discords that are legitimately community-informed and community-managed vs corporate ‘community guidelines’ that have frequent backlash by the users eg Instagram nipple policy
who is the comments section for?
the right to be an enigma, public art and its consequences
the right to ignorance of possible response, pre-caveats and disclaimers, fear of mis-speech preventing sharing anything - both on and offline
the importance of making mistakes, and dealing with them well
public forums for backlash, the ease of storing evidence of wrongdoing
public safety, safeguarding, what we owe to each other, online exploitation and consent
- ‘if you don’t like us maybe don’t follow us or don’t comment’ ‘no, you don’t get to say that. You’re a public figure.’
online culture as representative of offline culture to more or lesser extents
how comments sections on some forums can be more strictly controlled for integrity of useful educational eg coding, stack overflow, ‘this doesn’t answer the question’ sort of thing
upvoting, downvoting, distributed mechanisms for approval
QA forums, currency systems of social (or sometimes monetary) value, bulk answering without adding real value to discussion
what about as physical space? the internet as physical infrastructure

the internet as physical infrastructure

scary how reliant much of our current culture and social function globally is dependent on just a few undersea cables
(earth/techgnosis for internet conspiracy and divine angle to this, internet bloodline, lifeblood, wires)
original 70s net was for nuclear war reasons, defensive telecoms?
physical stacks, TCIPIP
How the data is physically stored and disseminated
Who is it connecting the backend and frontend, the people who integrate and translate data, interfaces better interfaces
internet labour, digital labour, technical labour, mechanical labour, hidden labour, computers, aka Black women

The Concept

Links

Notes

Nilsen’s 10 Heuristics (1990)

Schneiderman’s 8 “Golden Rules” (1987)

Tog’s First Principles (1978, revised 2014)

the internet as physical infrastructure