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copied!<p>There are fundamental principles of UI design embedded in this question. I strongly recommend everyone who touches on UI design should read, at a minimum, our very own Joel's <a href="http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000057.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">"Controlling Your Environment Makes You Happy"</a>, an article that I read some years ago that has stuck with me and is still as relevant today as it was the day it was written.</p> <p>I also recommend the book <a href="http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0321344758" rel="nofollow noreferrer">"Don't Make Me Think!"</a> as an excellent resource on the principles of good UI design, particularly on the power and importance of convention.</p> <p>Your list is all about conventions.</p> <p>Several comments:</p> <ul> <li>The Back button has always been (and will probably always be as long as the Web exists) controversial. There are security and usability reasons to disable it's use. Double-submit might be an annoyance on a forum but it can be a costly error with an order to buy shares. This can be handled with other techniques (eg POST+REDIRECT+GET or overwriting the browser history) but the point remains: Back button behaviour is not always desirable let alone required;</li> <li>Bookmarking a page and expecting the results has some merit (eg if I bookmark a quote for GOOG then I should go back there and get a current quote, not the quote I saw at the time I bookmarked, obviously) but a page result can also be costly so this may not always be appropriate.</li> </ul> <p>I'll add a couple:</p> <ul> <li>If I can click on it and it's not a button then the cursor should change to a hand when my mouse is over it;</li> <li>Conversely, if the cursor changes to a hand, I shold be able to click on it and it'll do something; and</li> <li>If there's a box containing some text that has a border and it looks like a text element on a form, then I should be able to type in it unless it indicates that it is "read-only" or "disabled" (eg by greying it out).</li> </ul>

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