USER INTERFACE DESIGN

Let’s talk about look and feel. How do you feel about the look of your site?

Normally the old saw is true. Looks aren’t everything. But if you’ve invested a million bucks “Web enabling” some critical business function, that’s a different story. Looks can kill. A poorly designed user interface can drive employee acceptance and compliance into the ground – or worse yet, drive customers away.

• “The average user interface has some 40 flaws. Correcting the easiest 20 of these yields an average improvement in usability of 50%. The big win, however, occurs when usability is factored in from the beginning. This can yield efficiency improvements of over 700%.”1
• According to a study of software engineering costs, 63% of large software projects significantly overran their estimates. Software managers cited 24 different reasons for the overruns. The top-four causes were related to usability engineering.2

Here’s the lunacy of it all. Designing a user interface is relatively inexpensive. Compared to most development budgets, it’s downright cheap. Yet, surprisingly, few companies bother to optimize the “front end.” The evidence of that is everywhere on the Internet (not to mention within corporate intranets and extranets).

Creating a functional user interface does not have to be a hit-or-miss proposition. It’s not a matter of finding a “hot” Web design shop. Usable design is the result of a controlled and verifiable process. Done right, it can result in the elimination of 99% of user- and site-generated errors. With the right baseline metrics, you can even demonstrate the ROI from redesigning your user interface.

Next :: Information architecture

1 Landauer, T. K. (1995), The trouble with computers: Usefulness, usability, and productivity. MIT Press.
2 Nielsen, J. (1993). Usability engineering. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann.