The Importance of UI Design

After testing complex applications and their associated configuration/management UIs for some time now, I've come to appreciate the importance and payoff of good UI design.

A good UI must feature simple and intuitive presentation, ultimately meeting the user's skill level on demand. Since most users will deal with the UI on a routine basis, its appeal makes up a big portion of what the customer will find compelling about a product.

This means a little investment up-front will go a long way!

Some design effort should be attempted before any code is written. This yields the following benefits:

• QA gains an opportunity to familiarize with the intended approach, can identify test tool candidates, prototype test cases, and provide early-on usability feedback.
• Developers will communicate effectively among themselves, determining the necessary classes and how functionality can be included ahead.
• Use Cases can be evaluated using the UI design. It's really useful to have use case tutorials made available to the product team up front, so all agree the necessary features are present and will work as intended.

'nuf said!