Joel ends up #4 on my list of Business of Software speakers. Here is my take on his talk.
Have you ever wondered why UAC in Windows Vista/7 annoys you so much? Joel tried to delve into this topic and uncover why users hate this kind of behavior.
To Joel, it really boils down to one thing, Design is the art of making decisions. Good design means the decisions were right, whereas bad design means the opposite. It is obvious that the UAC design was for security, not for users. In UI design, we need to be making decisions that help users accomplish their goal. Bad decisions interrupt users and cause them to hate your application.
Even though it sounds simple, most development companies think more about their product’s features than about how users use them. User’s don’t want a product, they want a solution to some problem! They might need features to accomplish this, but those features need to align with their goal, and not impede it.
This doesn’t mean we should sacrifice the number of features for simplicity, we should just make sure the features we implement help the users and not impede them. If we can do this, we have created an elegant application.
My favorite example is Amazon’s 1-click purchase button. Making 1-click actually work wasn’t easy. It took a lot of development work to handle all the cases, but in the end, it made accomplishing the user’s goal (buying something) easier than any other ecommerce site. No impedance. Don’t let the amount of work stop you from making the right decision. Creating an elegant application isn’t easy, but it is possible if you want to make it happen.
Lastly, think really hard about using modal dialogs.
