StanSight

Well Designed User Interface

“A user interface is well-designed when the program behaves exactly how the user thought it would.”

I love that quote. It seems to sum up the entirety of what a good user interface is. It’s not fancy graphics or cutting edge layouts. It’s providing people with what they need, when they need it. The best user interfaces are those that are so seamless that the casual user does not even notice them.

A good example of this is Google’s Finance page. This is an information rich page. Behaving as a casual user would expect a finance page to behave. One simple page providing all you need to know at a glance.

In fact, just looking at it, it is hard to point to any user interface at all. It appears to be nothing more than static information. Until you notice that the stock price is not a static number, but changing every few seconds (changing the web page title to match). Until you notice that the main stock graph is has flags on it that can be clicked to take you to news articles, or blogs about the company. Until you notice that mousing over the “Officers and directors” names at the bottom right of the page gives you expanded biographies and links to that officers reported salary and yearly compensations. Until…

You get the point. A good user interface does not jump up and down and try to get your attention, possibly distracting users from the information you really want them to focus on. Instead, it behaves how a user expects it to, providing more in depth behavior in seamless, unobtrusive ways. Ways that do not clutter up or interfere with the basic task.

What They Expect

But – how do you know what a user expects ? Well, you can try to think like a user. Pretend that you are a customer and try to figure out what you would want, and how you would react to different situations. This approach works, but is not optimal. It’s too easy to forget what it is like to know absolutely nothing about the project. For that, you will need some more people.

Grab people who are just walking down the hallway. Show them a prototype or demo and give them a simple task to do. Ask them what they think is happening. Take notes. Interview them using open questions. Never tell them “how” to do things. After you have done this with 5 or 6 people take the most common flaws (majority rules) and fix them.

A Well Desgined User Interface is one where a lot of hard work has gone into not making it hard for your users and customers.