Guidelines for basic user interface organization
This is an attempt to provide content-agnostic guidelines for structuring user interfaces and navigation patterns. These guidelines are more of a starting point than a final solution. They intend to be a methodological approach for defining structural patterns in user interfaces.
This isn't information architecture or application architecture.
Information architecture is deeply vested in content and understanding users' mental models. These guidelines are focused on utilizing scalable design systems for creating user interfaces.
Although there may be similarities and implied relationships, these guidelines do not attempt to discuss application or database architecture.
A simple sentence is composed of: a subject, a verb, and an object.
In a user interface:
- End users are usually the subjects.
- Users act on objects.
- Objects have different methods by which they can be acted upon.
- Objects have properties and may have states.
- In community-based, social products, users can act on and seek other users.
- Objects may have different relationships with one another.
Rough outlines follow
- ownership and other relationships - creating and destroying relationships between objects
- how are objects used: seeking, creating, editing, deleting
(Browse-based, non-search-based navigation)
- Filters and facets of the object
- High-level object methods
- User-related objects
- Objects
- High-level object methods
- The user
- User-related objects
- Filters
- index
- create
- show
- edit
- delete
- edit state
- edit relationship