Good User Interface Design Tips

As a follow up to an earlier post, Smashing Magazine posted 12 Useful Techniques for Good User Interface Design.  You can see many of these employed on our sites already - particularly darkening backgrounds when using a modal popup, shortening forms to a minimum, and effectively using tab navigations and dynamic 'lightbox' style slideshows.

The one we're just beginning to use (we started with our own intranet first) is enabling keyboard shortcuts from within the browser.  For example, we have built content management systems that let you press 'ctrl+s' for 'save' inside the browser, just as you would do inside Microsoft Word.  We've found keyboard shortcuts most effectively used on internal functionality, such as content management systems (as mentioned above), intranet applications (like calendars and schedules), etc., but we've also implemented keyboard shortcuts in slideshows - letting site visitors move through photos using the arrow keys, for example.

All in all, it's a good read, so check it out.