There are four major design aspects that all interfaces should have, many already exist in the physical world due to physical processes, but need to be replicated in the visual world for users to feel in control and comfortable.
Visibility
At all times, the user should be able to quickly see what is going on and what options they have.- Change icons when a process is running
- Give timers estimating how much time is left
- Gray out options that can't be chosen
- Give context-sensitive menus for a given context one of the best I've seen here is the Adobe Flash Designer whose entire bottom toolbox changed based upon what you had selected, yet it was still predictable.
A Good Conceptual Model
This is one of the biggest issues with design, especially in complex systems that could never be made in the physical world.Email is a nice example, you open an "Inbox" and read "Mail" that was "Sent" to you. Of course, you don't want to tell your users that email is mail, otherwise you end up with the dreaded "Please email me back the file, I sent you the only copy I have".
But the abstraction does remove doubt from the user's mind that the process is stable and will work, even if it doesn't work in the way that they believe or you portray.
Good Mappings
Every action should have an immediate and visible response, if the user presses "Send", don't wait on the message screen until the message is sent to return the user to the Inbox. Show the user what happened whenever they do something so they can build relations in their mind about what that is doing in software.Feedback
It doesn't matter so much that your software does computation, it just needs to inform the user of that or keep the user occupied while it is doing it; much in the same way that Mac OSX 10.6 shows an intro video: All new operating system installs need to do routine checks and get themselves in order, but there is surely a better way than this:
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