Thursday, March 22, 2007

Building Intuitive UIs

If you've read any of my posts at ReadWriteWeb, you know I love to look at things with an eye towards the past. So many times a new problem is really an old problem. Like User Interface Design.

I came across this video (Introducing the Book) while reading Scott Maxwell's blog. After I stopped laughing, I began to think about our own UI and how well it performs for our customers-- especially for a 'complex' business segment like project management.

In my opinion, we're doing pretty well. In fact, we recently did a screencast to show a few UI niceties we bring to project management. Little things like telling you whether your tasks are to the left or to the right of your current Gantt view. Or showing you why you can't link two tasks together-- highlighting the path that would create the circular link.

But I don't think we've built the most intuitive UI by any stretch. Project Management does have a certain amount of complexity. Connecting business systems to the web is not trivial. However, if you happen to hear from a customer 'That's all you have to do?', then you know you're on the right path.

And we do listen to our customers.

No comments: