The document discusses principles of interactive design, including consistency, visibility, learnability, predictability, and feedback. It uses the website thebeatplug.com as an example that demonstrates these principles well. The website keeps a consistent color scheme and layout, makes its functions obvious and easy to use with minimal clicks, allows users to easily learn how to navigate and use its catalog in a straightforward way, has predictable buttons that are clearly labeled, and provides feedback to users on the outcomes of their actions.

1. PID!
PRINCIPLES OF INTERACTIVE DESIGN- BY MARYKAY SCHNABEL

2. CONSISTENCY!
• Keeping elements consistent give users the feeling of
authenticity and familiarity. Humans are creatures of
habit and change can naturally throw them off. Appeal
to the subconscious by keeping things consistent, clean
and recognizable.
Thebeatplug.com is a perfect
example. He is a music
producer trying to sell his beats
to rappers. He keeps a
consistant color scheme the
whole way through his website.

3. VISIBILITY!
• Remember your demographic will not always be in your head.
• Your design needs to be obvious and user friendly.
• You need to guide them through every action on your website.
• They should never have to click a bunch of buttons to get to one simple outcome.
• Make things as easy as they can be for your user to interact with.

4. Thebeatplug.com also shows a good
examply of this. Their website is very
simple to use. You know exactly which
buttons to click on to get the exact
outcome you need. Nothing is blocking
anything or making the text hard to read.

5. LEARNABILITY!
• • The learnability of a design is based on comprehensibility: if you can’t understand it, you can’t learn it.
And vice versa. These rules will help keep your design easy to learn.
• Effectiveness: The number of functions learned, or the percentage of users who successfully learn and
use the product.
• Efficiency: The time it takes someone to learn (or re-learn) how to use a product, and their efficiency in
doing so.
• Satisfaction: The perceived value the person associates with their investment (time, effort, cost) in
learning how to use the product.
• Errors: Number of errors made, the ability to recover from those errors and the time it takes to do so.

6. Looking back at thebeatplug.com, a
perfect example of the learnability of his
website, is how you can learn to navigate
through his catalog.
It’s very clear that you can click on a song
if you want to play it, click the add to cart
button, or even click the button to share it
to someone else.
Everything is very simple and clear enough
that there should be minimal trial and
error.

7. PREDICTABILITY!
• If you make your page predictable, it makes the user naturally feel more comfortable and naturally will
be easier to navigate
• Remember that people are inclined to click on everything that they think is a button if there is no clear
direction of what they are looking for.
• It is important to keep your buttons labeled, weather it’s an image or a word.
• If the user knows what is going to happen when they click on a certain button they have more of a
sense of control and will stay on your website longer.

8. Again, this website is a perfect example of predictability.
Each button does exactly what you would predict it would do.
This makes you feel in control and comfortable moving around the website.

9. FEEDBACK!
Feedback is when your website gives the user a signal, to indicate that the action
that was chose either succeeded or failed at it’s task.
It generally answers the questions: Where am I, What is happenening, What
happens next, and what just happened.