The user interface IS THE APPLICATION

Posted on Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Nathaniel Talbott had a great presentation this evening at the Agile RTP meeting. His Lightning Talk (4 - 5 minutes), Jim Cramer style, was about spending more energy on your application's user interface. One line from his slides really hit home for me:

The user interface IS THE APPLICATION

I couldn't agree with this more. I have seen so many applications that are unusable and look horrible, but the test coverage is over 90! The architecture is scalable!  When someone wants to buy your product, they check out your "screenshots"... not your "codeshots". Having a good architecture is important, but throwing the user interface to the side is foolish.

Jayme

Comments

• Karthik on 3.05.2008 at 8:37 AM

• I think performance and scalability come a lot easier now than they did 5-6 years ago. The tools and platforms have gotten much stronger in both regards. Now developers can start to put more focus on providing a great UX (User experience) as well.

• Stacy on 3.05.2008 at 5:46 PM

• It makes me so happy to see this be embraced and prioritized by technical folks.

  A good user interface UNDERSTANDS the user, it knows what he/she needs in order to get his/her tasks done. It takes work to figure that out...just like it takes a lot of work to build a scalable architecture. I am working on a project now where we're doing user interviews, 1 hour each, 5-8 users. We have to remember that *WE*, the builders of the application are *NOT* the user :).

  But it's well worth it, I can't tell you how many times a poor UI has left me frustrated *cough*QuickArrow*cough* and I'm work with in software development, so I have some understanding. But with an app that has a well developed UX, the user doesn't notice the UI, it just "works".

  BTW, check out User Interface Engineering, there's loads of good stuff here (I love the podcasts): http://www.uie.com/

• Ben Carey on 3.06.2008 at 12:01 AM

• I loved that quote too. So true.

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• That is why I love console apps :) or just have a designer do it :)

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• I am working on a project now where we're doing user interviews, 1 hour each, 5-8 users

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• Nice quote. User interface design is important for many reasons. One of them is, the more intuitive the user interface the easier it is to use, and the easier it is to use and the less expensive to use it.

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