Building a great software product demands a user interface which appeals to the end-user and is easy and fun to use. A great user-experience guarantees a product’s acceptability in the market. This has lead to complex technological innovations of UI design for building user- friendly products. Many software developers consider themselves artistic enough, that they hardly follow any UI design standards or try to make a product attractive and easy to use from a customer’s point of view. Instead they resort to creating unique code and an attractive color scheme and believe that that is all that is required to build a good software product. This may have been acceptable in the past, but with growing competition, it is imperative to have product engineers to focus on technology and have separate usability specialists to focus on UI design. A good user interface renders a product easy to use; it reduces the cost of usage and maintenance, and results in happy customers. Having stated that, it is also necessary to maintain a consistency when designing a UI, by following UI design guidelines and best practices Besides designing of information, visual and interactivity items, one of the important things when designing a user interface is to take feedback from (alpha and beta) users on a regular basis. There may be different types of users who would be using the product, hence actual end-users of different persona types should be asked to test the product from a usability perspective in order to set the tone for success when the product goes to market. Related links |
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