I design user interfaces for a living, it is a strange blend of code, art, and guesswork. I want my interfaces to be useful, visually appealing, and functional. I’m writing software that people are using to do their job. As such, I want to provide an interface that allows my users to do their jobs as easily as possible. What may seem useful for one group of users may not be useful for another group of users. Trying to guess what people want to do, how they want to do it, and what results they want can be very challenging. While there are definitely wrong choices, I don’t believe it’s possible to satisfy everyone. Some people prefer Gmail, others prefer Yahoo Mail. I don’t think Google or Yahoo made mistakes that drove people away I just think that users have different preferences. To develop effective interfaces, you have to figure out who your users are and provide them an interface they want to use. Putting a good set of UI mockups in front of your users, or proxies for your users, can help determine which designs will work, and which designs won’t.
Mockups
I’ve used two basic strategies for developing UI mockups. First is hand drawing/using some tool like visio. Hand drawing is fairly inflexible, and the tools I’ve used have been fairly clumsy. I’d love to use something that is as quick as hand drawing, that still has the flexibility of using software. A second method of generating mockups is to write user interaction code to drive the mockups. While this method is also time consuming, ideally you will end up with some usable code. When you show the design to the user, you can actually demonstrate how things will work in a live environment, this too is a good thing. If your initial design is too far away from what the user wants, you may end up having to throw away work you were hoping to use later. I know we don’t have time for this in our organization, I doubt others do either. I think it’s useful to develop a set of hand drawn/computer drawn mockups to help present different design options to your potential users. Once you have an idea of what they like/dislike, you can start working on the coded interaction. This way, you are helping to ensure that you are effectively using your time.
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