Reading “Shneiderman’s Eight Golden Rules of Interface,” I understood the rules as sort of commandments for basic user interface that every website should use if they want to see good results. To assess each of these rules, we’ll take a look at a website known as sharkrobot.com, which sells shirts, hoodies, posters, keychains, wallets, hats, and books. About a month ago, the youtuber that I mentioned in a previous blog post, natewantstobattle, hosted a charity stream on Youtube in which he would play either Pokemon X and Y or Super Smash Brothers for the Nintendo 3DS with viewers. Aside from all the good fun, Nate was selling a T-shirt called Zoroark’s Cove (which can be seen below) through Shark Robot just for that one day and all of the profits that he made from it went to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. The reason he did this was because a childhood friend of his introduced him to video-games but unfortunately died to Leukemia around the age of twelve and Nate felt bad that he could not thank his friend for his success because that exposure to the video-game world is what led to the creation and rise of his channel. Hearing this, I supported the charity stream by buying the shirt (which I received but the size was too small so I sent it back and am currently waiting for anew one) from Shark Robot.
At the time, I just visited sharkrobot.com to buy the shirt, but after reading “Shneiderman’s Eight Golden Rules of Interface,” I decided to see how each of those rules is put into play here. The reason why I chose this website is that I feel like shopping websites satisfy the fourth rule the best. If you can find another example that uses the third rule, let me know. Anyway, the first rule strive for consistency, is very straightforward and goes back to when Miriam was talking about controlled vocabulary. The second rule says that an interface should enable frequent users to use shortcuts which I cannot really see on Shark Robot, but to be fair I can’t think of another example from the top of my head and perhaps I have not explored the website enough to know whether it provides shortcuts for frequent users. Next is offering informative feedback which I can testify for seeing as how I gave the website feedback about one of my orders because a week and four days had passed before the shirt arrived at my house. The fourth rule, which was mentioned above states that the interface should design dialogue to yield closure. The way I understand this rule, there should be a beginning, middle, and end action and the best example I could think of for this is the process of buying something over the internet. Depending on the website there will be a different amount of steps but all of them ask for personal information and credit card information.
The fifth rule is offer simple error handling and from what I’ve seen, there aren’t any errors on the website. Rule number six says to permit easy reversal actions which I cannot really see but again, I haven’t explored the website enough to encounter it. Next is support internal locus of control and everything seems fine in this department. There aren’t annoying pop-ups or imposing features. The final rule states reduce short-term memory load which is also in order because the pages are stable and links do not open other pages. Overall, this website seems to follow these basic rules.