Ugly UI

April 21, 2008 @ Pawel Brodzinski on Software Project Management from Pawel Brodzinski

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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.


This article is syndicated from Pawel Brodzinski on Software Project Management . The original article is available here. Read more in Pawel Brodzinski on Software Project Management, Project Management News .

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