10 Best Application UIs

Nielsen Norman Group conducted a competition to identify the 10 best-designed application user interfaces. Some of the common elements of the winning designs include:

• Business-Oriented Interaction
• Progressive Disclosure
• Freeform and Linear Task Flows to support both experts and newbies
• Limited use of Modal Dialog boxes
• Lightboxes
• Inline User Assistance
• Contextual, Cheap, and Quick Usability Testing Methods

The lightbox benefit is obvious: it's impossible for users to overlook the only bright part of the screen. This is in stark contrast to many traditional designs, where users often remain blissfully ignorant of notifications that are camouflaged within busy pages.

Lightboxes do have downsides, however, and they shouldn't be used everywhere.

• A lightbox is a blunt instrument that hits users over the head and causes them to stop everything they're doing. Don't use them for low-priority items or background information.
• Talk about modal dialog boxes. A lightbox takes that concept to the extreme. (Even though it's theoretically possible to enable interaction with the dimmed parts of the screen, in practice this just isn't done because something that's dimmed should be inactive.)
• Users often have to refer to information on the background display to resolve the situation in the foreground dialog box. If the background is dimmed too much, such information can be hard to read.