UI Design in Development World
Jeff Atwood over at Coding Horror yesterday wrote an interesting article about designing user interfaces, prototyping, and getting locked into design patterns based on code rather than user expectations.
He quoted a fellow named Rick Schaut about the ideal way of going about software development:
When you’re working on end-user software, and it doesn’t matter if you’re working on a web app, adding a feature to an existing application, or working on a plug-in for some other application, you need to design the UI first.
This is hard for a couple of reasons. The first is that most programmers, particularly those who’ve been trained through University-level computer science courses, learned how to program by first writing code that was intended to be run via the command line. As a consequence, we learned how to implement efficient algorithms for common computer science problems, but we never learned how to design a good UI.
Notice the emphasis I put on ideal above. In too many cases where there’s a large team working on a project, and I’m the only one looking at UI and User Experience, the UI is developed after the coding has already begun.
This becomes particularly problematic when a new application is being built, and assumptions are made about what users want without considering the results of usability testing and analysis. C’est la vie.
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Adam is a User Experience Specialist at IBM in Toronto and also produces content of all kinds around the Web.
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I appreciate to your knowledge.Really it is problematic when a new application is being built, and assumptions are made about what users want without considering the results of usability testing and analysis.