Making the user interface
How do you design the user interface to a computer system? Ask a programmer and
he may say:
The user interface? Oh, it is so boring. We add it when the important parts of the
program have been made.
Ask a specialist in human–computer interaction (HCI) and he might say:
The user interface? Oh, you have to study the users and their tasks. To do this you must
know a lot about psychology, ergonomics and sociology. Designing it? Well, you have to
come up with a prototype of the user interface and review it with the users.
Programming? Oh, that is what the programmers do when the user interface has been
designed.
Is there a communication gap here? Yes, for sure. The truth is that it is easy to make a
user interface – exactly as the programmer says – but it is hard to make a good user
interface – and that is what the HCI specialist tries to do.
There are thousands of books on programming. Common to all those I have seen is
that the user interface is rather unimportant – it is just a matter of input to and
output from the program. Programming is very difficult and there is nothing wrong
with dedicating thousands of books to it. The only problem is that the programmers