Recent Posts
Post Categories
Pretty much every tech product, whether a mobile phone or a web app, has a feature list — a big list of things that product promises to do. Companies are proud of their long feature lists and consumers love to compare the features of their new gadget against that of their friends’. But there is one thing that’s even more important than all of this. The user interface (UI).
The user interface is the gateway between the person using a product and its feature set — indeed, without a UI, the user wouldn’t be able to interact with their gadget or app. Make a bad UI and the user won’t be able to get to half the features your product has (and that’s if you’re lucky). They just won’t be able to navigate to the feature they were looking for, won’t figure out how to use it or simply won’t even know it’s there.
UI is the key feature of any tech product for three reasons:
1. The UI controls the user’s access to all the features a device or application has.
To use an app or a gadget, people have to use it’s interface — there’s really no other way to interact with it. To call someone, you have to use a phone’s keypad. To get to a webpage, you have to type it into the address bar of your browser. To change the settings of your word processor, you have to navigate to them using the menu controls. The more complicated and difficult the UI, the less features people will use — they just won’t figure out how to get to them and how to use them.
2. The UI stays with the user most of the time — it delivers user experience.
All the controls, buttons and menus of a UI stay with the user pretty much all the time — and a lot of that time is spent interacting with them. The UI then, plays a huge part in delivering user experience. Make a difficult and slow interface and people will get frustrated and annoyed. Make a great interface and people will enjoy using your product.
3. The UI creates friction between the user and their work.
A bad UI will create a lot of friction — tasks will take longer to complete simply because there are more buttons to click and more menus to navigate. Even if the user knows what they’re doing, a bad UI will negatively affect productivity and slow them down.
I’d say those three points are pretty important.
Why then do so many developers ignore this and produce apps and gadgets with awful interfaces that most people can’t figure out how to use?
This seems to be because many developers underestimate the difficulty of making a good UI. There is a lack of respect for designers, who are considered the people who just make things look nice. That of course is wrong. UI design is the hard part, in many cases much harder than the back-end code. Designing a good UI isn’t figuring out what something will look like — it’s figuring out how something will work.
John Gruber of Daring Fireball wrote a nice article a while back on “spray-on usability” in open source software. He writes:
- software that performs function X; and
- software that performs function X, with an intuitive well-designed user interface
isn’t just a little bit of extra work. It’s not even twice the work. It’s an entire order of magnitude more work. Developing software with a good UI requires both aptitude and a lot of hard work.
What’s more, there seems to be a complete ignorance of the importance of UI in many circles — just look at people bashing the iPhone for it’s lack of features. “Sure” they say, “the iPhone has a pretty interface, but my Windows Mobile phone has tons more features”.
But wait — how many features do you actually use on that thing? The iPhone delivers ease of use and user experience. People actually use all the features it provides, because they are easy to get to and easy to figure out. It’s actually a joy to use this phone — it makes you want to explore, to press all the buttons, to use all the features. The UI is what makes this product great, not it’s feature set.
UI is the killer feature
The user interface isn’t just the outer wrapper of a gadget or application that’s there to make it look good — it’s a map to the features the product offers and the vehicle that takes you there. Creating a good UI is absolutely vital if you want to make a successful product.
Companies like Apple have really grasped this concept and focus all their attention on making the interface as good as possible. Others who ignore the importance of UI make products that have long feature lists, but are really unusable because of their clunky navigation, difficult controls and uninviting aesthetic. These products deliver frustration — not a good user experience.
Don’t underestimate the importance of UI — it’s your product’s most important feature.
Very true. Web Dev’s get so caught up in design and intricate features , we/they forget we are designing for the average computer user. Need proof? See Craigslist. Great article.
Nice article. Nice UI not only provides an easier way to play with the product, it also tries to create an aura that attracts users and force them to stick to it. I agree UI design is one of the most difficult and important task, it not only involves the thinking of the author it also requires consistent and accurate understanding of users psyche.
haha I’m going to show every future employer this article. Front End Developers are so important!!
I’ll add that a feature is only as good as it’s implementation, and in most consumer apps, that’s the UI.
Very good article. I’m working on an interface design myself, and the client keeps adding more and more features, sometimes it is easy to lose the purpose, a good interface may make the most complicated things simple to use
Yawn — another fawning “iPhone is a joy to use” article. Yes, I had one. No, I didn’t like it, except as a read-only medium (viewing web pages was great; anything business-related was disastrous).
Here’s a fun exercise: Write and send an email without looking at the iPhone’s fantastic interface. What? You can’t? Hoy ’bout making a hands-free call? Hmmm, sounds like a UI problem to me.
michael: Sure — that’s a trade off. The phone doesn’t fulfill every need and certain benefits that a physical keyboard brings are lost — but the user experience this product offers is so far ahead of anything else that the phone stands apart as a separate entity.
You don’t have to take my word for it though — it’s been financially very successful for Apple. The product delivered both: happy customers and a lot of profit — and I believe this is largely thanks to it’s usable UI.
UI development is the hard part. And it’s not the last step, it’s the first step. LOOOL
this is not TRUE at ALL. it will always come at last.
There is no need for a UI interface if the business logic is not yet implemented and tested.
and why should it come at last? because when implementing the business logic you usually test it using a test unit/case without even referring to the UI part. Moreover UI development and business logic development are 2 different and INDEPENDENT processes. so there is no such thing as comes first and last. go read about the Soft. Eng. life cycle.
I disagree. Implementing business logic goes hand-in-hand with developing the UI. Sounds like you’re referring to business logic and “the look,” but certainly not user-interfacing.
UI development includes information architecture. It has to go along with the development of business logic. To be a successfull product/service a good UI is veryimportant.
I couldn’t agree more. If most early adopters are like me they have ADD. If I can’t successfully interract and create something via the UI within the first few minutes of tinkering, I leave.
I also loathe almost all technology that requires a download and installation in order to interact with the content portions of the site. Stumbleupon, for example.
Regards,
Mattb4rd
@ Ruds
Don’t mistake current practice with also being the right one. Just because things are done in one way nowadays, that doesn’t make it optimal. In fact, studies have shown that creating the UI first will save you a lot of hours developing. Reason? If you nail the UI to begin with by making a series of prototypes, all the time optimizing it according to usability tests, you’ll end up with an almost final model, that represents the system as the user sees it. Once that is in place, there is little change during the development phase. How many projects have you been on that, at some point, required you to redesign some of the interface because the user didn’t feel comfortable with the way it worked? If the answer is “none”, then either you’ve been the most lucky developer on the planet, or the case is that you simply don’t care about customer satisfaction.
You might create the most sophisticated piece of software in history, but if your UI sucks, chances are users will never find out… they will be using another product.
I agree that UI development isn’t the number one step you’re going to do when you start working on your application — the first steps are ideas and plans as to what your application needs to do — coming up with a basic feature set.
Now, the next step is UI design — especially for consumer products — working closely with your business logic. The UI is absolutely vital because that’s the thing that’s going to take the user to their end goal — you need to make sure it’s quick, easy and takes the least possible steps.
How’s the user going to interact with your system to make the features work? That’s the role of the UI, and if you’re working on a consumer product, that’s the key because it will be directly responsible for the user experience. Some business systems may not need this focus on UI because their primary interaction won’t be with the user, but in the case of productivity software, mobile phones, electronic devices and so on, this definitely applies.
[...] usabilitypost.com | UI is the Killer Feature [...]
[...] بعض النقاط مأخوذة من هذه المقالة [...]