He conducted fundamental research in the field of human–computer interaction, developing new ideas, methods, and tools such as the direct manipulation interface, and his eight rules of design.

He then went on to study at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he received an MS in Computer Science in 1972 and graduated with a PhD in 1973.

Shneiderman started his academic career at the State University of New York at Farmingdale in 1968 as instructor at the Department of Data Processing.

[2] In 2002 his book Leonardo's Laptop: Human Needs and the New Computing Technologies was Winner of an IEEE-USA Award for Distinguished Contributions Furthering Public Understanding of the Profession.

[13]Furthermore, Shneiderman had conducted experiments which suggested that flowcharts were not helpful for writing, understanding, or modifying computer programs.

Included in this book is his most popular list of "Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design", which read: These guidelines are frequently taught in courses on Human-Computer Interaction.

He applied those principles to design innovative user interfaces such as the highlighted selectable phrases in text, that were used in the commercially successful Hyperties.

Tim Berners-Lee cited this disk as the source for his "hot spots" in his Spring 1989 manifesto[19] for the World Wide Web.

The HCIL team applied direct manipulation principles for touchscreen home automation systems, finger-painting programs,[21] and the double-box range sliders[22] that gained prominence by their inclusion in Spotfire.

Those events helped define the two current dominant themes in human-computer interaction:[26] direct human control of computer operations via visual user interfaces vs delegation of control to interface agents that know the users desires and act on their behalf, thereby requiring less human attention.

[30] Treemaps are implemented in most information visualization tools including Spotfire, Tableau Software, QlikView, SAS, JMP, and Microsoft Excel.

He also developed dynamic queries sliders with multiple coordinated displays that are a key component of Spotfire, which was acquired by TIBCO in 2007.

Current work deals with visualization of temporal event sequences, such as found in Electronic Health Records, in systems such as LifeLines2[32] and EventFlow.

In 2012, Jeffrey Heer and Shneiderman coauthored the article "Interactive Dynamics for Visual Analysis" in Association for Computing Machinery Queue vol.

Included in this article is a taxonomy of interactive dynamics to assist researchers, designers, analysts, educators, and students in evaluating and creating visual analysis tools.

[34] He also defined the research area of universal usability to encourage greater attention to diverse users, languages, cultures, screen sizes, network speeds, and technology platforms.