Learning iOS Design: A Hands-On Guide for Programmers and Designers

9. The Gracious Interface

How can you make the mundane steps of interacting with an app seem as sensible and easy as possible? That quest corresponds to the second of Donald Norman’s three levels of cognitive processing: the behavioral level. (Chapter 8, as you’ll remember, deals with the visceral level.) At the behavioral level, people are thinking about the elementary tasks that they want to get done: add, edit, move, or delete an item; move to a different screen; open a document, and so on. A gracious interface accommodates those basic interactions so deftly that the user seldom gets hung up on how to do them. In Chapter 8 you saw how a graceful interface makes the instant-to-instant interactions feel good; now we step up a level to look at ...