Ugly UI
We use to say user interfaces we create are ugly. And in many cases we don’t care.
When I’m a user I complain every time when I work with unintuitive application.
Where’s my consistency then?
A little difference is within target group of users. When a target group for an application are typical Internet-eaters, like you or me, you need to give more. It’s not enough to have every single feature user can think of. You need to have it intuitive and nice. Other way people will go away choosing either ease of use or beautiful façade of competitors. By the way I’m still struggling with Office 2007 – it is way nicer than its predecessor but for biased user of a series of older version new interface isn’t very intuitive. That’s definitely not a sure shot when talking about GUI.
Fortunately you can have another group of end-users. System administrators are great example. They need to be able to do as much things as they can with their UI. Flexibility is a number one here. Intuitiveness is important too but usually users are far too experienced to allow your application to defeat them. But nice GUI design? Who cares? As far as it allows you to do what you want you don’t give a damn how it looks like.
On the side note I’m not a complete hypocrite. In our internal timesheets application I don’t care about GUI design as far as I have reports I need and my team doesn’t cry whenever they need to fill in monthly data. And that interface is ugly indeed.
Coming back to GUI we develop, most of them are either for administrators or for maintenance teams. Then we don’t have to focus much on UI graphical design. No one would really pay for it. Ugly can be good enough.
2 comments:
In my industry, I like to make a distinction between people users can train and users I cannot.
We can't train people on our public facing website. So our approach to usability here is simplicity and intuitiveness through user-testing.
We /can/ train internal users (like in a call center or support). So our approach here has little to do with intuitiveness. If we can design a screenflow that shaves 5 seconds off of call time (for every call) at the expense of having to train new hires for an extra 5 minutes (one time only), then we'll have provided hige ROI over the life of that application.
For the latter approach, a good industrial engineer is worth more than a set of expert users.
I think that's another great example when usability isn't the number one. You hit the nail with your trainable/untrainable definition.
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