And when you cater to the Mac market, you're talking about the platform where applications have to bleed coolness - often with ground-breaking user interfaces, like Delicious Library or Apple's iApps. Following the platform's interface guidelines is only half the work: your job is to provide an elegant user interface that conveys information in an efficient manner, interacting in a compelling way at the same level as your target user.
Granted, I make database front-ends for a living. The boring kind of applications: accounting, order processing, and all that happy fun stuff that involves storing data in and loading it back from a database, and providing reports and statistics so that the end users can do their job. In my time, I have seen plenty of applications that were built from a developers' point of view. Which means it's logical, in a way, though not necessarily matching the user's line of thinking.
If you're lucky, the team that built the thing in the first place, took the time to read up on human-computer interaction, and tried to learn from the other applications out there. And if you're really lucky, they had someone on their team smart enough to say: "It's not enough to have menus and windows and buttons, but we should make sure that all elements in our application work consistently, as this will cut down on user training and support calls."
But I didn't mean to step onto the soapbox here - I just wanted to point you over to this entry on the Theocacao website - a blog for Mac developers, written by Scott Stevenson, who also maintains the Cocoa Dev Central learning center. You can fetch the slides of his UI Design Essentials talk as well as a movie recording. It may take a while to download the 532MB QuickTime HD file, but it is well worth it.
He talks about the history of developers and designers in software development, and although he can't make you a designer in as short a timeframe as an hour, he does make excellent points and offers practical advice. Specific topics touched include: the basics of iterative design and usability testing, the use of whitespace and partitioning, correct labels and prompts, as well as fonts and language design, covering inspector palettes and icons in the process.
He also ran through a real application that someone was brave enough to submit, pointing out design flaws that turn this functionally excellent application into something users can get to work by themselves, but could be so much better and easier to use by making a number of tweaks. In the wrap-up, he mentions a number of 'model citizens' that we should look at. Some of the best bits came up during the Q&A session at the end, which is only available in the video recording, unfortunately.
As you wait for the download to make its way to your computer, you may also want to chase down these books:
- Designing Interfaces by Jenifer Tidwell (O'Reilly)
- About Face 3 by Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann and David Cronin (Wiley)
Of course, there are other resources out there, but I'm not going to add much more to this post - instead, I would like to encourage you to go out and look at applications that you use every day, and write down what you find annoying and what you like about the way it interacts with you as a user. And the n try to repeat what thery do right, and avoid what they do wrong.
While Quartam Reports works the way it does, as it was modeled after the Report Builder that shipped with Foxpro, it's not going to stay that way forever. I've already been prototyping a complete overhaul for a while now, and hope to make it a reality for version 2.0 - balancing between the "let's just get it over with" mindset of a developer who has to develop 189 of those pesky things, and the mindset of someone who is perhaps less-seasoned in the raw developing process, but has a good idea of the end-product and how it should turn mere facts into empowering information.
In the meantime, there's plenty to learn and consider and tweak, as usual... Not to mention plenty of code to toss and rewrite... It just never ends, does it?
