Making the Web Work: Designing Effective Web Applications

Anchoring Design: The Core Values of Control and Satisfaction

Desirability results from a product’s overall utility and value to users. Utility and value, however, are dependent on a product’s raw capabilities as well as users’ capacity to take advantage of them. Although desirability is clearly affected by the overall feature set, in the more narrow context of interface design, the concern is users’ ability to exploit those features. Therefore, the question here is “What are the values and principles useful for evaluating the quality of a design solution?”

Interactive designs should be judged against the metric of two specific values: control and satisfaction. Control is the interface’s ability to provide an appropriate level of direction ...