"principle of least astonishment" meaning in English

See principle of least astonishment in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Proper name

Head templates: {{en-proper noun}} principle of least astonishment
  1. (software, user interface, design) A principle that the design should match the user's experience, expectations, and mental models. Wikipedia link: principle of least astonishment Synonyms: POLA, principle of least surprise Translations (user interface principle): vähimmän kummastuksen periaate (Finnish), principe de moindre surprise [masculine] (French), Prinzip der geringsten Überraschung [neuter] (German)

Alternative forms

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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2025-05-27 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2025-05-20 using wiktextract (a4e883e and f1c2b61). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.