Re: Hard to Revise a UI

[Beth Agnew <beth -dot- agnew -at- senecac -dot- on -dot- ca>]

It could be a harder fix than you realize. In order to get a good UI, 
you have to have correctly gathered the requirements -- what the product 
is supposed to do for the user. It sounds like your company is letting 
the developers design the product based on their own (assumptive and 
usually faulty) ideas of what they think the product should do. It all 
comes back to a correctly-managed Software Development Life Cycle. I see 
the kind of mess you describe in companies where they have very little 
process or capability maturity. The jump in and start coding because 
someone has a bright idea about what they think would make a good 
software product.

Instead, they should talk to the potential users (this is marketing's 
job) to find out what they need from the product. Once you have those 
requirements, an intelligent process is followed to develop 
specifications and design. Then the developers should simply build what 
has been approved. Changes are rigorously controlled to keep them 
aligned with the requirements. You get a well-designed user-friendly UI 
because the designers (not always the developers) have thought about the 
product from the user's perspective.

The other factors are laziness and lack of foresight. I have seen too 
many products that had the typical 3-pane interface with a file browser 
on the left and selector or input panels on the right because it is 
standard with MFC code. The product became what was easiest for the 
developers. You either have a user-focused development methodology, or a 
developer-focused one. That kind of change is organic and fundamental, 
and not likely to happen unless the company has an epiphany.

For examples of getting stuck with a UI that serves the developers or 
engineers rather than the users, just look at the early computers, and 
even the typewriter. While there have been UI improvements, most of them 
still work the way that is best for the computer, not the user. The 
users have had to learn to adapt.

Nancy Allison wrote: