The Old and the New Axioms of User Interfaces: Unspoken Existence, Crisis, and Implications for Design and Engineering

Axioms are self-evident propositions used in formal deductive systems. This work intends to show that there are unrecognized axioms of user interface design that serve as starting points for building interactive systems. From foundational theories, laws, principles, and guidelines, and through a distillation process, the identified axioms are enunciated and explained. The set of five is called the old axioms and they are in crisis. Old axioms are insufficient to support new developments and trends in Human-Computer Interaction. A new set is needed, and it is proposed here. The five new axioms shift focus from "computer-centric" to "object-of-interest-centric". Nowadays, computing devices come and go, but the digital objects that belong to users, remain. That is why the center of attention has to move and adhere to new principles.