Rules of Application Development · 8 February, 12:05 AM
Users will give the benefit of the doubt to just about anything that looks nicely designed. That is to say, you can have a product that does everything including shining your shoes, but if it looks like crap, users won’t ever be happy with it – and any flaws they do find will be magnified substantially. On the other hand, if a user sits down in front of your application, website, widget or what have you and it looks nice, it could have a million bugs, and they’ll be more satisfied with the application and more accepting of any bugs. Beattie’s First Rule of Application Development
I’ve advocated the opposite for quite a while now. I think “Weakliem’s First Rule of Application Development” would be your design should consist primarily of blue text on a white background. I noticed this first with Craigslist, but then quickly realized that the basic elements of the design are present on Google, and to a lesser extent, eBay and Yahoo: simple color schemes, simple interface, yet highly functional. Recall that when Google first appeared, most search engines embraced the design philosophy still in evidence at MSN.com: bright and noisy, yet roughly equivalent in functionality. Google was positively audacious in both its austerity and its function. Bloglines is another example of a website that is quite simple and plain, yet was wildly successful until its technical shortcomings became apparent. Similarly, My employer’s website is frequently ridiculed for being amateurishly designed, and while I wouldn’t call the design simple, the site has thrived in spite of its looks; no less, in spite of the presence of competitors with websites that look much more polished.
Russell’s corollary advice isn’t bad: hire a good designer early on. It seems to me that the application developer should strive for clean and logical markup and a simple interface on top of great functionality. A good designer can indeed work wonders on top of this framework, but I think that it’s the wrong path to emphasize looks over other attributes.
— Gordon Weakliem
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Totally agree – since moving from back end applications to desktop apps, this is one thing I’ve been working really hard to improve on.
Simple things like shortening the text on a form from 10 words to 5 can make a world of difference when it comes to usability.
— Nick Harris · Feb 8, 10:32 AM · #