Introduction:Design

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<todo>Introduction text.</todo>

Design for People

User Interfaces are, by design, meant to be for people. People interact with your software using the user interface (UI) you give them, so in order to get a good experience the UI should be friendly and well thought out. There is nothing worse then having a great program be underappreciated because the interaction is suboptimal. Likewise; an immature program might be seen to have great potential and be a pleasure to use if the user interface is well designed.

Making a user interface pleasant to use implies that you have to know about the user. Users are people and a lot of research on people can be used to reach the best interaction results. These guidelines themselves are a result of said research.

Where the guidelines end is where the application design becomes most important. Designing an application for people in construction should give a different result than a design for doctors in hospitals. The assumptions the application may have about common knowledge is obviously very different between these groups of users.

Know your user

Applications always have a target audience. The audience can range from a small set of people to a huge market with overlapping skill groups. It is important to introduce features with the target group in mind. This is called user-centered design (UCD)

For example, a ledger application (Kalculate) targeted at accountants comes bundled with a new feature; a simple pop-up calculator. Some time after the new release hits, the sales crew comes back with the sad message that a simple calculator is useless for most accountants, since most of them will have a calculator on their desk anyway. The feature is removed in the next release.

Just as important is knowing that you are not your user. If you work with your application and have a technical knowledge of the application you are probably the worst person to judge if something is clear and logical to the user. Your intimate knowledge of the underlying program design will ensure that you, as a user, will not make many beginners' mistakes. Always do user testing on real users that are the intended audience.

See Also

Related To

Keywords

user-centered design (UCD)