Re: What do they want?

Believe it or not (and it took me a while), a lot of user acceptance of a product can be to do with literally how pretty the thing is - whether it's pastel shades or primary colours... Yeah - right. That's what I thought. But then you consider the amount of corporate Flash sites out there where the management obviously looked at it and said "Great - get it out there" without considering how well it actually performed its function...or the evolution of Windows - there's been a version-change or two there that basically consisted of not much more than a GUI re-design.

I've done the same trick myself, sad to say...taken a 'functional' program that's generated a bunch of user requests, got a designer in to make the buttons look nicer and prettify the menus / dialog boxes, and handed it back to rapturous applause. As programmers, we often tend to think in more functional ways where interfaces are concerned - but some users *like* clicking A, seeing a pretty box, scrolling down, clicking B etc., rather than simply typing 'find' at a command prompt as you or I would tend to do.

Just my $new_world_order_currency * 0.02.
Ben

Comment on Re: What do they want?

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Re: What do they want?
by crenz (Priest) on May 01, 2003 at 21:04 UTC

This is very true. I'd summarize your post in the following statement: Non-technical people normally will judge the completeness of your application by the UI you present.

The corollary would be: If you want to avoid frustration, demo half-finished software with an at most half-finished UI. If the UI is perfect, but the backend doesn't work, your boss will be very astonished why it takes you so long to finish your job since "everything is already working".

Note, by the way, that this is not meant to be demeaning to non-techies -- not at all. It is just normal to judge things by outer appearance if we lack the understanding of the inner workings, and it takes an effort to make yourself understand that you need to look closer. It happens to programmers as well, just in other areas.

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