Pattern 70: WYSIWYCU
AKA: What You See Is What You Can Use

You are designing interactive features of your site and understand PRIMING AND INTERFERENCE (18), THE RHETORIC OF ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE (20) and EQUAL OPPORTUNITY(65)).

How do you draw attention to features of your site?

Therefore

Make sure that it is always clear how to use or manipulate anything that is visible on the screen. Buttons should look clickable. Menus should look pulldownable. And if it looks clickable it should do something (useful).

This pattern is supported by using OBLIQUE LANDMARKS (73).

The WYSIWYG principle is well known to GUI designers. The acronym stands for What You See Is What You Get and implies the principle that all forms of output should be the same; e.g. the layout, fount and size of characters that appear on a screen will be exactly what a printer produces. Current browser technology makes this almost impossible to achieve on the web. The designer cannot control how a user’s browser will display content. However, there is another principle that can be applied.

WYSIWYCU stands for What You See Is What You Can Use. If there is an object on the screen you should be able do something to it or with it and what that something is should be as natural and obvious as possible. Future computer systems may, I hope, generalize this to: WYKAIWYCU (What You Know About Is What You Can Use). I know about cut and paste. Why can’t I use it in a typical modal dialogue box? Well, I can actually – if I know about the keyboard shortcuts, but I had to find out the hard way.
One thing that disorients users is the appearance of things that appear to be clickable that turn out not to be, violating WYSIWYCU. People tend to give up on such sites quickly.

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