Universal Principles of UX

34

Make notifications valuable.

Remember Microsoft’s Clippy, the paperclip-shaped assistant spamming us with unhelpful hints and suggestions? Within Microsoft, its internal codename was “TFC,” with “C” meaning “clown” and “TF” meaning—well, you can probably guess what that meant. The problem with Clippy—and hints from the system in general—is that when we’re in the middle of something, we really hate being interrupted (see Principle 33).

But notifications aren’t inherently evil. In fact, oftentimes they can make the overall user experience better. Imagine if there weren’t any error messages informing us something was filled out incorrectly, warnings right before we tried to delete something important, or alerts that notified us of important ...