What makes a good UI for you?
 

Hey there--our company is offering a new service in the fall and we need an absolutely intuitive UI. Aesthetics should be secondary to functionality for the segment we're going after.

What elements do you think make a good user interface / experience?

Thanks...Jack

Hey, Marine! Remember "K.I.S.S." :D

Semper Fi!

Randy

I assume a web front end is what you are talking about.

Clear verbage and graphics. If you make it to decorative or too complex, it's a pain. Flash type stuff is a pain. If every click takes you to another page, it's a pain.

You don't want too much or too little stuff on the page. If you have drop downs and boxes to fill in then a page worth is good, but if you have to scroll because the page is 10 feet long, it's no good. If each page only half a page, but you have to go through 20 pages then you have too little.

Maybe a better idea of what sort of stuff you UI will be doing.



I can't help myself. My first thought after reading the title was to say that this is a great UI, but that wouldn't be very helpful in a serious thread, so I didn't. Aren't you glad?

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1182999462.jpg

That's a nearly impossible question to answer based on the limited info provided.

That's like asking what are the best controls for a new vehicle.

Well is it a plane, boat, car or train?

yup...can't answer the question. The UI depends on the tesks, the users, and the systems involved.

I always liked The Brain. For linked sources, large data sets, it's kinda cool.

Usability testing from as early on as possible.

With interfaces or ordering systems, we'll even use paper prototyping to nail down an intuitive process before we get anyone to start coding.

Once we have something built, we won't release any new functionality without at least 2 rounds of recorded usabilty testing.

It's just too expensive to find problems and make changes once something is out in production.

Thanks. I wanted some feedback prior to telling you about the app--I think every UI should have some inherent characteristics generic to good usability.

The UI will be a web-based service for parsing, normalizing, aggregating/algorithmic matching, and cleansing files uploaded or emailed by a business or IT user. Having to validate the parsing and transformation and configure the match fields and weights will be UI-tricky, I'm thinking, although my dev folks don't think so--but they are tech guys and I, a business guy who knows tech-lingo only.

Different delivery times and payment options. English, Hindi, Mandarin, Arabic, Spanish, and French supported for V1.

I see the file mgt piece as similar to google documents. No flash, few, if any graphics, just clean functionality.

This give you enough?

Jack

PS K.I.S.S. is definitely the call for this one.

"The only intuitive interface is the nipple. Everything else is learned."

That said, I dream of the day I can throw my mouse in the trash. I've never been as productive as when vi and a shell were my only applications.

+1, vi took a while to get used to but once you learned it no other editor could touch it.

holtjv.....

Are you by chance from San Antonio ????

Nope. Austin.

Jack

I charge $1K/day plus expenses for consulting. Email me if you're interested ;)

And yes, we wireframe and paper-protoype everything we build.

Does that include the Pelican discount? Seems cheap to me. :D I'll give you a call if we can get past the NIH. Our folks are pretty good but we've not done a completely self-service app before--always had an account rep to train and hand-hold.

Shoot me a PM with a link to your portfolio if you like...Jack