Why Are Good User Interfaces So Hard to Make? Three Insights into Good Design

Last year at Internet World a woman asked me why software and Web sites were so hard to use. Let's call her Pandora. I told Pandora that either we aren't smart enough yet, or the industry has not matured to the point at which well-designed products are required for companies to be profitable. She didn't buy it. She swore that sometimes we just did it on purpose. She laughed when she said it, but I think she meant it. It's my job to make simple-to-use products, and I took what she said to heart. I said that we really are trying, and that we're getting better at it all the time. She walked away unimpressed. I went back to the hotel bar that night and thought about why things are the way they are with the Internet and computers.

Berkun, Scott. UIWeb (1999). Design>User Interface>User Centered Design>Web Design

Why Do People Become Attached to Their Products?

How can a designer increase the degree to which people bond with a product? This is the question researcher Ruth Mugge tackled, who has recently received her PhD degree on this topic at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering of Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands.

Mugge, Ruth. uiGarden (2007). Design>User Experience>User Interface

Why Good Design Comes from Bad Design

When I was a computer science/philosophy student at CMU, I took a design project course to learn about all of this interface design stuff I'd heard about. The first day of class I arrived at the studio room, and found a young man at a drawing table, sketching out different variations of the Walkman® he was designing. I got close enough to see the large sketchpad and saw 30 or 40 different variations that he had considered and put down on paper. I introduced myself, pleaded ignorance about design, and asked him why he needed to make so many sketches. He thought for a second, and then said, 'I don't know what a good idea looks like until I've seen the bad ones.' I smiled, but was puzzled. I felt like going back across campus to the computer science labs. If he's a designer, shouldn't he make fewer sketches instead of more? I didn't really understand what he was talking about until many years later.

Berkun, Scott. UIWeb (2000). Design>User Interface

Why is it so Hard to Make Products that People Love?

Why do so many good designs get trampled during the product development process? If everyone is trying to create something good for their customers, why is the development process so rife with disagreements and compromises that actually hurt businesses in the long run? If everyone has the same good intentions, can't the business people just make up their minds about what kind of product they want to create and let design create the right solution?

Adlin, Tamara and John Pruitt. Gain: AIGA Journal of Business and Design (2006). Design>User Interface>Collaboration

Why Mobile Phones are Annoying

Bystanders rated mobile-phone conversations as dramatically more noticeable, intrusive, and annoying than conversations conducted face-to-face. While volume was an issue, hearing only half a discussion also seemed to up the irritation factor.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2004). Design>User Interface>Usability>Voice

Windowing the World of Online Information  

Designing online information requires an understanding of user interface design, screen design and hypertext technologies. Multi-window environments have quickly become the standard within user interfaces and so this paper explores the application of multi-window systems to online information by reviewing the research and some of the current applications of multi-window online information.

Berry, Robert R. and Michelle Corbin Nichols. STC Proceedings (1995). Design>Web Design>User Interface

Wizards  

Allen describes the uses, benefits, and drawbacks of 'wizards'--utilities that help users perform particular tasks.

Allen, Kristen. Intercom (2000). Design>User Interface>Wizards

Working XML: Use Eclipse to build a user interface for XM

Anyone familiar with XM -- the low-cost, open-source content management solution based on XSLT -- knows that for all its good points, it still lacks a decent user interface. In this article, columnist Benoï¿t Marchal uses the Eclipse platform's open universal framework to build a user interface for XM.

Marchal, Benoit. IBM (2002). Design>User Interface>Software>XML

Writer as Designer: Building Quality into the Design  

Provides background for writers beginning to work in design and an introduction to practical methods to build quality into the design of software, forms (whether paper or online), and highly detailed processes used by diverse users. These methods support both macro and micro control of highly detailed products throughout the iterative stages of design. The workshop includes exercises and covers essential background, such as how to determine what is quality for your company and why design fails. The workshop deals with requirements for success, including the importance of standards, and with application of the methods to design specifications, user documentation, and testing. The workshop materials also include examples of the method applied to a commonly available commercial product.

Bibus, Connie M. 'C.J.' and William D. Gearhart. STC Proceedings (1996). Design>User Interface>Usability

XML在用户界面(User Interface)中的应用

我们可以使用多种方法，通过XML描述用户界面。事实上，XML是在HTML的基础上成长起来的，而HTML则是一种当前流行的面向网络的用户界面。有了XML，你就可以使用用许多方便快捷的技巧创建有用的和可用的用户界面。

ZDNet (2002). (Chinese) Design>User Interface>XML

Yahoo! Mail: Simplicity Holds Up Over Time

In many respects, email is the ideal web application: it's an application that people often need access to when they’re away from their 'home' environment, and the core user tasks (reading and writing) are easily accommodated with standard HTML interface elements.

Garrett, Jesse James. Boxes and Arrows (2002). Design>Web Design>User Interface>User Centered Design

Zebra Striping: More Data for the Case

I recently conducted a study into the helpfulness (or lack thereof) of zebra striping—the shading of alternate rows in a table or form. The study measured performance as users completed a series of tasks and found no statistically significant improvement in accuracy—and very little statistically significant improvement in speed when zebra stripes were implemented.

Enders, Jessica. List Apart, A (2008). Articles>Web Design>Human Computer Interaction>User Interface

Fun with Overflows

Making use of the overflow and scrollLeft DOM property to scroll elements is a much more effective use of the CPU, over animating using CSS top/left. So this episode of J4D demonstrates the same effect used in two completely different ways.

Sharp, Remy. jQuery for Designers (2008). Articles>Web Design>User Interface>Ajax

Creative User Interfaces in Modern Web Design

The whole may be more than the sum of its parts, but without the parts, there is no whole. Lest that sound like some weird philosophical meandering to you, take comfort in observing the finer aspects of creative and appealing user interface design.

Smashing (2008). Design>Web Design>User Interface

Clean, Cutting-Edge UI Design Cuts McAfee's Support Calls by 90%

When McAfee Inc. recently introduced its ProtectionPilot software--a dashboard-type management console for its Active VirusScan SMB Edition and Active Virus Defense SMB Edition suites--the trial downloads were fast and furious: In the first 10 weeks after release, more than 20,000 users went online to get a copy.

Hadley, Bruce. SoftwareCEO (2004). Articles>Web Design>User Interface

Image Links vs. Text Links

Years back, we compared successful clickstreams (clickstreams that resulted in users accomplishing their goals, as observed in tons of usability tests) with unsuccessful clickstreams (clickstreams where users abandoned their goals before completing), looking for any clues that would help us predict behaviors in one that we didn’t see in the other. One factor we looked for was whether the clickstreams contained image links versus text links — does one type of link show up more often in successful clickstreams than the other. Our finding was when users clicked in image links they were just as likely to succeed or fail as when the clicked on text links. There was no statistically-meaningful difference.

Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering (2006). Articles>Web Design>User Interface>Hypertext

The Art of Expectations

I’d personally love a computer experience which emphasized ‘flow’ and gradual, constant change. No longer would every little change pull your attention away from an important task. Instead, those Mail notifications, system messages and the like could gently change without you noticing, until you decided you wanted to actually look.

Lang, Keith. UI and Us (2008). Articles>User Interface>User Centered Design>Cognitive Psychology

AJAX Interface Design

AJAX enables faster, more responsive Web applications through a combination of asynchronous Javascript, the Document Object Model (DOM), and XMLhttpRequest. What this means for Web interface designers is that a DHTML-based Web application can make quick, incremental updates to a user interface without reloading the entire screen.

Wroblewski, Luke. LukeW Interface Designs (2006). Articles>Web Design>User Interface>Ajax

Persuasive Design: Tapping the Main Line

We love stories, recognise patterns in fractions of a second and have a set of highly developed social behaviours. In "Persuasive Design" Mike will be running through a collection of these hard-wired influence points and exploring how they can be used in the design of products, interfaces and experiences.

Stenhouse, Mike. SlideShare (2008). Presentations>User Interface>Persuasive Design>Cognitive Psychology

Interaction Elasticity

Usage goes down as interaction costs increase. User motivation determines how fast demand drops, following an elasticity curve.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2008). Articles>Usability>User Interface>Interaction Design

Antipatterns

Using patterns has become a well-known design practice and is also considered best practice in the software development community. While UX teams can and should constantly promote best practice, we can also approach tackling poor design practice from the other side: antipatterns. Antipatterns are approaches to common problems that might appear obvious, but are less than optimal in practice.

Hornsby, Peter. UXmatters (2009). Articles>Web Design>User Interface

Making the Right Constraints for Usable and Accessible User Interfaces

This paper focuses on managing constraints in a way that enables developers to create an accessible and usable user interface (UI). The constraining processes presented in this paper comprise of a language to describe a logical web page in an application, a basic bottom-up repository management system and the processing required for compiling pages.

Cornelius, Gary and John J. Chelsom. IDEAlliance (2005). Articles>Information Design>User Interface>Usability

Putting the Wrecking Ball to the User Interface (UI)

Does a truly intuitive user interface exist? The author of this blog post doesn't think so. To create one, designers and developers really need to put the wrecking ball to the UI as it is now.

Nesbitt, Scott. DMN Communications (2009). Articles>User Interface>TC>User Centered Design

Seven Interface Design Techniques to Simplify and De-Clutter Your Interfaces

What is simplicity? Simplicity is the quality of being natural, plain and easy to understand. It is not surprising then that simplicity is often thrived for in user interface design. Most people naturally dislike complexity in devices and software. Yes, some people find joy in figuring out how something works, but for most of us, being unable to operate a device leads to wasted time and frustration, and that’s not a good thing. If you can take a complex device or a piece of software and somehow rearrange, reorganize and redesign the interface to make it easy to use and understand, then you’re well on the way to delivering a better user experience. In this article I’m going to talk about 7 practical techniques that you can utilize in web design to make your websites or web applications simpler and less cluttered.

Webdesigner Depot (2009). Design>Web Design>User Interface>Minimalism