The 5 B’s of user interface design

I’m sitting in Nairobi at the WHO Standards Meeting listening to Mike McCay presenting about user interface design. He introduced the five B’s (which he attributed to Christian Allen). Users are attracted to parts of a user interface in this order:

1. Bikinis — people are attracted to images, so make sure that images are used judiciously
2. Buttons — buttons indicate what’s next; how can the user progress
3. Boxes — boxes contain important stuff
4. Blue links — links indicate the most important part(s) of the text
5. B.S. — bogus stuff is all the other stuff on the page, which the user looks at last