Aah – I spend so much time trying to make the Presentation Layer of my applications as ‘thin’ as possible – one might think that I believe it to be unimportant. Alas- I believe the opposite is true. While I think of myself as sort of an enterprise software guy – I think that end users CARE about the usability of their software. 9 times out of 10 – there are non-technical end users for my software. These people have some goals. They try to meet these goals by doing some tasks. The ability for the users to understand how to accomplish these tasks to meet their goals is what matters.
Since I tend to believe that the UI is actually very important for software applications – I tend to think about it a lot. I have spent lots of the time on the server – building web services. I have spent lots of time on the server building servlet like services. I have spent lots of time in databases. I have spent lots of time building web UIs. I have spent lots of time building Windows Desktop App UIs. I have had to build service daemons, agent like thingys, and all things in between. All of that said – end users care about their ability to get their goals met and about not being made to feel dumb.

I DO think that prototyping UIs is a good plan. I do think that making the UI as SIMPLE and CLEAR as possible is very important. I DO NOT think that putting zillions of rarely used features into UI applications is useful. I DO NOT think that this is at all ‘hard’ I just think it needs to be considered. Anyhow – here are a few decent links to read some tidbits about designing for usability. Much of this is ‘web geared’ but do not be thrown by that – it is all relevant in any UI environment.
Sites
welie.com
designinginterfaces.com
Yahoo! Patterns
asktog

Books
the design of everyday things
the inmates are running the asylum
user interface design for programmers

Enjoy!

Chris

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