Comments on: Most important, yet most overlooked..

By: Ton Dumans

Ton Dumans — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 12:22:26 +0000

Hi Lucas, thanks for your nice words. Of course I have to agree, to make a good application, only a great UI without any functionality is not going to please much customers. Balance is everything, but in order to make a statement to bring some balance, sometimes one has to go ‘all out’ in emphasizing the other end of the scale…
When it comes to cheaply fixable pitfalls, one can think along the lines of low-contrast fonts, increasing (negative as well as positive!) feedback after user actions.
Pay attention to overly cluttered screens. Focus is key, breaking up a screen into two, three or as many as five or six different screens will hugely increase a user’s focus and hence ease his task-at-hand.
Lastly, I’ve heard rumors that rounded corners help to take the edge off the day
Best regards,
Ton

By: Lucas Jellema

Lucas Jellema — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 12:11:55 +0000

Great piece, Ton. Reality check for us technology minded folks. And also from my experience only too true. You can make users happy with things that may seem almost meaningless or certainly not high priority from the point of view of a developer. It is sometimes hard to accept that the smallest change in the UI is much more helpful to end users than some complex architecture pattern you finally mastered. Of course without the 'invisible' layers, the UI would just be an empty shell, like a pretty but dumb blond developer or an iceberg with nothing hiding under water. So it is a matter of balance. But you are right to stress to us-not-so-much-in-tune-with-our-end-user-day-to-day-demands-developers that in the end, to the users, UI is everything.

Do you have examples of easy to fix UI pitfalls?

kind regards,

Lucas