ABSTRACT
Human-computer-interaction guidelines are intended to assist designers, smooth the progress of designing and improve the quality and consistency of interface components. Although these guidelines, standards and style guides are widely accepted by user interface designers, users often still experience problems while interacting with an interface. In order to empirically verify the reviewed HCI guidelines, three experiments were conducted. For each experiment a simple interface was designed and each time one of the design features (i.e. background-foreground colour combinations, number of colours used in an interface, text size and text style) was manipulated. There are several guidelines on efficient colour coding and it seems that these guidelines are more effective than guidelines that merely give recommendations on the number of colours which should be used in an interface. The results of the experiment on the effective background-foreground colour combinations as well as the points mentioned in the literature indicate that many factors affect the effectiveness of a colour combination.
