posted on Monday, June 27, 2005 12:40 PM
by
thomasswilliams
Jeff Atwood: UI Is Hard
Jeff hits the nail right on the head when he posts “UI Is Hard” (and the comments on his post are interesting too). Jeff points out and indeed highlights the fact that “you need to design the UI first”.
There have been cases where I have built the back-end logic and then realised that the UI won't conform to it, so I've either had to change the back-end or, worse, had a clunky UI. I'm ashamed to say that many, many times I find myself explaining my UI to a user (even after they've been using it for a while). And often in my time as a developer I have coded the logic and processes, slapped on a few textboxes and buttons and called it a UI. It's when I start actually using my stuff that I realise there is room for improvement.
Asking the potential users early on in the piece can help. And I have found that keeping things Microsoft-like in the look and feel (e.g. standard buttons, groupboxes, menus) can add to the “intuitiveness“ of an interface. I guess “Office” is about the standard I want (somewhere between “Windows Explorer” and “Windows Media Player”). I try to get in the habit of sketching the interface on a piece of paper to make sure I've got all the elements I need, before figuring out my code.
So I agree - UI is hard.
Endnote: Recently I was complemented on some of my UI design - I used a quite simple, “inductive”-style user interface based on http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnforms/html/winforms09212004.asp.