The Sapir-WIMP hypothesis: The more easily you can talk about a user interface, the more easily you can understand how to manipulate it.
We used to use a very similar principle here: If you can’t document it in a way that makes sense, the interface doesn’t make sense. I say “used to” only because I have no clue if it’s still in play. I think it fell by the wayside when we had to write documentation describing how to set things up in other products.1
- Products designed by developers who clearly didn’t follow this principle. [↩]