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My blog has been quiet for awhile. I guess that’s the benefit of having a blog where there isn’t much traffic. It’s just me and my notes and there is no real pressure for updates unless I’m feeling like formally expressing some thoughts. Anyway, it’s finals time here at Stanford, and that means it’s time to draw conclusions from a quarter of experiences. (Yeah, I know temporal comments and statements make a page age faster than usual.)
All the science and mathematics that gets the attention in formal computer science sometimes just doesn’t do justice to particular area of computer science/engineer - the UI. Of course, there is the HCI (Human Computer Interaction) with their ideas and reasonings, but none of that seems to be concrete. Maybe that’s how it has got to be. The user interface, being a topic where metrics can only be subjective, should perhaps stay intangable, abstract, and, in a way, volatile.
In the end, the biggest indication of success for any project is the reaction of the audience. Whether the benefits of a happy audience mean monetary gain for commercial projects, or whatever the underlying cause, there is no doubt that no project should get that seal of completeness until it has been through extensive end-user testing and feedback. In a project happens to find itself in the public’s good graces in the factor of usability, that project is bound to find successes (financial or otherwise).
Take any number of current digital successes and it’s immediately apparent that the prior statement holds by empirical observation. In fact, it can be said that the most intuitive, most fluid, most customizable, and most understandable user interfaces will draw success given that all other factors remain constant or equal. Take the iPod and compare it with other DAPs in the market and you have one example of how UI can be the sole factor for success in special circumstances. (Of course, the other big factor is price, but let’s leave that for the economists.)
However, as the measure of a good UI is such a subjective thing, how does a programmer or developer - one who necessarily thinks in 1’s and 0’s translate logic and computation into art - into something that is beautiful in design, something that transpires engineering in numbers? Conversely, how does an artist or designer - one who necessarily posits art in some non-engineering medium help translate design to concrete development? How does a team know when they have something that is canonical in its interfacing - when they’ve created something that handles the user’s every whim like a telepath? Those who can answer these questions are certainly those creating all the magic. Those who cannot are doomed to one dimensional development. Approaches to bridge the gap between artistic design and system design certainly vary from site to site, project to project; but, we should recognize that such an approach must be explicit for any project to be successful. One thing is certain: when the perfect design is achieved for a given project, its success is self-evident. As if some magic phenomenon of optimization has been reached, the end-product begs to be used, and we will all beg to use it.
- LW