UI - You don't know how much you suck

I made a small mistake in my last post - instead of 'do what you want' what I meant to say was:

Hire a damn graphic designer and buy some icons!

This is a subtle difference, but the delusion of competency is unfortunately common.

Like your home handyman disasters, the DYI attitude for user interfaces can cost you big time.

However IT departments are usually too cheap, and some developer ego's are too big to realize that they can't do everything... thus UI abominations are created everyday.


UI development is hard, harder than most people think. 

The UI layer is where everything comes together, and as a result it's here you find all the issues with the underlying architecture.


If you're a UI developer - you suck, so make sure you check out the UI guidelines for your dev system (Microsoft, Apple, Gnome or KDE).

If you're not a UI developer; shut up, fix your code and give the UI guys a break.

Oh, and good luck!

Disclaimer: I've done both jobs, so I suck twice as much.

UI - You can't please everyone

Although it's difficult to create good UI, it doesn't mean that bad UI is easy - in fact some people go to great lengths to produce bad UI.

That said, good UI simply boils down to:

Intuitive, Pretty and Performant - in a combination that targets the intended user.

eg. A programmer is going to prefer performance over pretty, and a hairdresser might prefer pretty over intuitive... but you still need all three for a good user experience.

If you don't have access to your user (and that's generally the case), just pretend that you are the user.

If you wouldn't use your own app; that's a good sign of bad UI.

In the end, you can't please everyone - so please yourself, then at least one person is happy.