User Interface, one of the widely discussed
subject these days after search engines. Every software development team either
hires a UI specialist or consults an expert to design the next best killer
application. As more and more users log onto the net, user base tends to grow
and new technologies evolve, web developers and designers are left with very
little time to cope up with new techniques in user interface. Thus a new wave of
User Interface issues has occurred in the software development life
cycle.
User Interface puzzle - Last winter I was
puzzled with a situation wherein I was asked to determine the user guidelines
and standards for the company that I was consulting, had to dig deep into the
problem to find out which user interface best suited them. I guess as a
developer, analyst or UI specialist one would commonly come across in one’s
project life cycle, here is how I kept myself abreast with new technology and UI
standards.
Analyze current market trends in Usability – The first
step before you can start in order to determine the technique and standards to
adapt, look around in the market for latest trends and here is what I found from
Microsoft to Apple it was all about usability, every new application that is
designed are “user centric” or “user friendly”.
Apple's huge success of
iPod could be determined as part of its user friendly mp3 music player, while
rest of the competitors are still tweaking their units to gain market
share. Apple's new OS (Operating system) Tiger, is another good example to
understand users and developing the user interface with right technology which
changed the new look and feel of the most awaited version of Microsoft,
Longhorn.
Microsoft's new OS Longhorn has brought forth similar
changes to its UI, something very catchy if you're like me. The program menu and
the entire fly-out menu that appears if you have installed unwieldy list of
programs, is gone which was a real nuisance. In the new version, a scrolling
list of your programs is built in a sub window on the left side of the start
menu and a small dialog entry box is alive at the bottom of the start menu,
Microsoft finally gave its ears to howling users.
Now it gets challenging
to figure out how I can make things work and be able to create such drastic UI
changes and if I have to change, how do I proceed? What would be my thumb rule
for changes? All these questions start haunting you and you might not have
answers and this is what makes it interesting.
User
Interface is mainly dependant on TWO main factors
User skill set
Technology
User skill set
Every time an application is built you need to keep
in mind it is for the users who could vary from novice to an expert, the success
of your application is purely dependant on how efficiently the users use the
application.
Building applications for users introduces us to the topic
of persona, these days all major software vendors are persona concept based
applications. Personas are synthesized from a series of ethnographic interviews
with real people, recorded behavior patterns, goals, skills, attitudes, and
environment, thus developers are aware of the users feelings and build better
applications keeping the persona in mind.
User Skill set is very
essential for understanding their knowledge in application usage that you are
building, some users have no knowledge and some have all the Knowledge whom I
call as “Geeks”, with such extremes you tend to have the “Gap” of users as
illustrated below.
The User
Interface Engineering (UIE) group refers the
gap as "The Knowledge Gap", and every organization should and must educate their
users to upgrade current knowledge point and develop applications intuitive
enough to satisfy a broad band of users.
Technology:
Evolving technology is another key factor in
building new UI designs and interfaces; again I did some market research for
typical stateless protocol applications (web based apps). My findings relived
that the search engine giant has taken a leap in this technology and is
exploring newer frontiers as we read the following article.
Market
Trends: In Google's email the key distinguish factor is user interface,
ability to read, compose and send emails is made lot easier and they achieved by
using the latest web technology called AJAX - abbreviated for Asynchronous
JavaScript + XML, making it more interactive and user friendly.
The
spell checking mechanism and ability to choose email address from list by typing
few letters of the email are some of the features where this technology is more
relevant and the presence is felt by the users.
Few of the killer web
based applications that have evolved on this technology and are going to hit the
market in few months from now
Moving On…. Ok, now onto real question
as to, how do I build applications with better User Interface? Their is no
cookie cutter answer to this question, UI is a process and dependant on two key
factors as I indicated, with each iteration of software development we weigh in
the skill set of users and the technology at our disposal and build
applications.
I practice this UI process along with some standard
Software development life cycles (SDLC) as listed below:
Interaction with stake holders to gather requirements, assess their skill
set • Create Personas to define the user base
Prepare proto types for user feedback, usability tests
Share the results with stake holders and development teams ( it is like a
blue print before you construct a house)
Let your development team get innovative with components and technical
stuff, keeping the frame work in mind
Have a review of alpha version of your application with users
Share it with beta users, watch them while they use your killer application
Provide feedback on the usage and fine tune it for before you launch
Few companies go an extra step in building a User Interface
Guideline so developers and designers can abide by those guidelines during
development for a consistent look and feel of applications/web
pages.
User Interface is a double edge sword and every iteration of your
development you need to review your user skill set and technology, which allows
your passion of building application in tune with market and users, happy
programming!!!
About
Author: Harsha Sarjapur is co-founder of InfoSourcing Inc, devoted to providing
outsourcing solution to small and medium business. He is tech-savvy in the field
of product and project management with a patent pending in search engine
optimization for e-commerce websites. He can be reached at
Harsha@info-sourcing.com
for Small and Medium Business.
Apple's huge success of
iPod could be determined as part of its user friendly mp3 music player, while
rest of the competitors are still tweaking their units to gain market
share.
Microsoft's new OS Longhorn has brought forth similar
changes to its UI, something very catchy if you're like me. The program menu and
the entire fly-out menu that appears if you have installed unwieldy list of
programs, is gone which was a real nuisance. In the new version, a scrolling
list of your programs is built in a sub window on the left side of the start
menu and a small dialog entry box is alive at the bottom of the start menu,
Microsoft finally gave its ears to howling users.
