Make your application looking nice. I don’t say every app has to be shiny and polished like Vista, but make it looking good enough for your users. If you write for system administrators then console should be enough. But if you do anything more, even when your UI can look ugly don’t make it sloppy. Controls set straight. Buttons placed intuitively on each window. Toolbars don’t changing their appearance randomly. All controls and options accessible with keyboard.
You get much with little effort.
Whole usability issues series.
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Pawel,
I’ve thought about this topic off an on over the years and here’s where I have ended up;
A slick UI costs money and so the effort has to be worth the investment.
So if it is customr facing; yep it’s a priority requirement. A bad UI has an impact on sales and reputation.
If it is for the IT department, yep, give them nothing. Or better yet, they’re propelerheads – so give them this.
But if it’s for your call centre workers or your data entry clerks, what then?
One argument is that they need a good UI so the learning curve is lower and they can get productive faster – so invest.
Another is that they are paid to come to work, so they’ll figure it out quickly enough – so do little.
These are simplified views.
The real answer comes from an analysis of the user groups; is there a high staff churn? If so, then training is an issue.
Will the workers adopt the system you are deploying regardless or do they have alternatives? At the end of the day, will a change management effort be cheaper and easier than UI design efforts?
It’s all contextual and there are no black and white answers for this set.
It all comes back to “what will help achive the project goals?”
Which is a whole other topic.
I agree you don’t need to give shiny, beautiful interface to each user. It all depends who will use the application.
However even when UI is ugly nothing justifies not caring about setting cotrols straight, leaving random cotrol order and creating no shortcuts.
It’s no longer investing to make the application looking cool and trendy. It’s showing that you actually care about your user at least a bit.
Those basic things don’t take much work, yet developers often tend to forget about them since it’s not the most fascinating thing they can do.
Yes, point taken.
Possibly developers hve forgotten because project mnagers are at them so often to minimise scope.