When I say don’t offer help prematurely the most important thing I mean is don’t offer help immediately.

Trust me when someone is having trouble using something you built your impulse is going to be to help them right away.

Bite you lip and *wait until they ask* for help.

When they ask give them a hint, do this twice, the third time they ask just tell them how to do it.

There is a caveat, you have to until they ask for help – *after* they try to perform the task. Any questions they ask before they try to perform the action doesn’t count.

The reason for this is that it’s so common for users to be told what to do, sometimes the first question a user will ask before they even try anything is “so what do I do?”.

To which you should answer “What do you think you should do?”. Because again they might be so accustomed to being told what to do they might think this is a trick question.

If you get that sense you might to explain to them that you are trying to make the application easy to use and that you want them to try to use.

Your goal is to get them to try. This is important to say say because when you ask them “What do you think you should do?” they might respond with a question “Do I press this button?”.

Don’t answer that question. Instead encourage them to give it a try.

You want to get them actually trying to perform the action so that you can observe them.

Remember you goal is to figure out what they would have done if they had no outside direction. Put another way you want to find out what was intuitive to them.

I really like your lists for improving upon UI/UX and think that every application developer including myself should think about applying these rules.

Thanks.

Glad you found it useful. One tip I didn’t include in the article is to start off with a good template or theme if at all possible. When you use a theme you basically skip steps and let a designer do a lot of the initial heavy lifting.

Just stay away from control libraries where each control looks like an advance futuristic gadget. Those controls look great on their own but when you put a lot of them on the same page they are overwhelming. The key is to keep it simple.

An example of a good HTML theme and framework is Bootstrap (free – http://getbootstrap.com/). If you are working with WinForms or WPF there are themes for that as well, similiar themes probably exist for most UI platforms. In some cases they might be paid theme, but generally they are less than $100 and they are more than worth the time they save you.

Thanks Travis! That one is definitely going on my Amazon wish list. I actually got into programming originally because I wanted to make games, even worked a game company for while, so the book recommendation especially resonates with me.