Minimalist and Intuitive User Interface Design Guidelines for Consumer Electronics Devices.

Abstract

People today come in contact with many consumer electronics (CE) devices in their daily lives. CE devices have become increasingly complex with added functionality; devices from different vendors provide different user interfaces for the same functionality; similar devices from the same vendor provide different user interfaces for common functionality. As a result, usability of CE devices has become a serious challenge for most users. In this paper, we put forth design guidelines for making user interfaces for CE devices easy to understand for most everyday users. To do this, we first present a taxonomy of user interface dimensions for CE devices. We then present our design guidelines against core elements of the taxonomy, and apply them against various popular CE devices. The designing guidelines, when applied consistently and diligently, can help bring some order to the current state of user interfaces for CE devices. The results of this paper should be applicable to a good extent to general digital systems