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.

What’s wrong with simply checking screen width ? In my opinion there is a 99% probability that anything with a width of 640 or under is a mobile device.

Sure this will not tell anything about the capabilites of the browser (CSS/JavaScript/ect support) – but knowing it’s a cell phone would certainly give you a chance to know you have a low bandwidth device with a small screen – so don’t make them download your 1024×100 jpg page banner or the 1024×764 full page photos of your pet dog.

According to Leichtman Research broadband penetration in the US should break 90% by mid-2008. This is based on a survey conducted in February of 2008 showing that broadband was in 57% of U.S. households: http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0802/

Personally – I’ll take the trending numbers with a grain of salt until they are confirmed, but this defintly shows that a majority of US households now have broadband, and I would hazard a guess that those households contain the newest and most active populace of the web surfing world.

So if you are designing for mid to younger audiences – go hog wild with the graphics, videos and flash. If you are designing a geneology or quilting bee web site – stick with small graphics and text for those dial up users.

But – in all cases – follow good design principles. Remember more is not always better: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/100/beauty-of-simplicity.html

JavaScript Frameworks are cross-browser user interface JavaScript libraries designed to make it easier to develop complex Graphical User Interfaces (GUI’s) for web pages.

I’ve tended to stay away from JavaScript Frameworks. My view was that in an attempt to be generic libraries they have introduced complexity, making it harder to implement and debug. Frankly, I did not want to spend a lot of time learning proprietary syntax to a library which may not be around all that long. There seemed to be a new flavor-of-the month library coming out ever other month. Here is just a small list of the currently most popular:

The Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) – http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/
Prototype – http://www.prototypejs.org/
ExtJS – http://extjs.com/
script.aculo.us – http://script.aculo.us/
Dojo – http://dojotoolkit.org/
jQuery – http://jquery.com/
mootools – http://mootools.net/

And the list goes on …

BUT – Looking over some of the newer frameworks – such as Ext JS 2.0 : http://extjs.com/ it certainly looks like a lot of functionality and maturity is starting to creep into them.

So – Have JavaScript Frameworks now hit a level of maturity that a business can feel confident that if they use them that code will not be outdated and impossible to maintain in less than a year?

As a developer is it getting to the point where JavaScript Frameworks need to be taken more seriously?

Have you ever noticed that those people who vehemently argue for writing pages which work in Firefox frequently design pages which are totally unusable if viewed on a 800×600 video screen?

Yet almost the same number of people who use Firefox, 13% of the browser market as of September 2007, (http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2007/September/browser.php) browse the web on a computer with a video screen set to a 800×600 resolution (10% of the browser market: http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2007/September/res.php)

So – Why the lack of (loud) public support from the web design community?

Is it because web designers are loathed to give up their big header graphic images and navigation buttons which take up half the screen even on larger screens ? Is it because shouting for the cause of the 800×600 display can’t drum up the rabid fan-boyism of “stickin-it-to-microsoft” that supporters of the Firefox browser enjoy?

Or is it simply that the young web designer crowd do not have friends which browse the web at 800×600 and therefore do not consider it important (after all if their friends are not doing it why bother to design for it) ?