This morning Nathan and I hit Robert Hoekman’s presentation on The Seven Rules for Great Web Application Design. Robert has achieved some level web-celebrity as the author of ‘Designing the Obvious‘ and ‘Designing the Moment‘. The presentation promised to reveal the 7 essential design principles for achieving great application design.

Without further delay, here are the 7 rules:

1. Understand your users, then ignore them.
2. Build only what is absolutely necessary. (It’s not about simplicity, it’s about clarity)
3. Support the user’s mental model.
4. Turn beginners into intermediates, immediately.
5. Prevent errors and handle the rest gracefully (Poka-Yoke)
6. I zoned out while he was explaining rule #6 (sorry)
7. Reduce, reduce, reduce. (and refine)

The end goal is really all about making users feel smart, respected, and productive.