Originally posted: ZogBlog::road less traveled, on October 14th, 10:38p EST.
I've always argued how important a UI is... and have made some progress with my coworkers.
A UI must be functional, and look REALLY good. The better it looks the better the reviews/customer feedback will be. Unfortunately this is often overlooked by even the most seasoned programmer. A programmer that I really admire (in fact I often say that I learned C# back in the b2 days by stepping through his code) once said that he use to make the mistake of working to hard on the UI and not enough on the feature set.
While I agree in part with that sentiment... you should never ignore the UI by giving it no thought at all. That's just bad design.
So, it's good to see that other people agree with me. In Shipping Software & Broken Windows, John Lawrence. He says:
If software looks bad, then it sends a message about the quality of the product underneath.
I whole heartedly agree. Micky Gousset over on his Team System Blog says:
One thing I have found though, is that appearance is everything. I can have all the functionality working perfectly, and it does everything the customer wants, but if I have not prettied up the final site, they are always very negative towards testing it. However, if I have prettied up the site, even if have the stuff on there does not work, they are always more positive toward the application. Go figure.
Although I don't think appearance is everything, it is more important than many developer's would characterize it. A comment to the Shipping Software entry points out a possible flaw in this theory:
I'm afraid we have the opposite problem - if it looks great, the customers (and sometimes the management) tend to assume that all the code behind the UI is done. Having the germ of something that works is great for the coders' morale, but you get a boatload of "what do you mean it isn't done yet?"-type questions.
Yep. Make sure the functionality is there, but don't forget the UI at EVERY stage of development. The earlier you think about the UI, the easier it is to implement, or change as the web/win forms evolve.
posted @ Thursday, November 18, 2004 2:44 PM