A bit of history:
During the 80s, when I was a school-goer, DOS was king. We learnt up those commands to display the directory on a machine and then run an EXE file, which normally used to be a game – TD2CGA to be more precise. It wasn’t every person’s cup of tea and most people preferred to use paper. Black screen, white text and blinking cursors were meant for a younger generation. It was certainly not user-friendly.

The start of the 90s saw Windows 3.1 and also saw more capable computers which would truly change the user’s mindset. Of course, many people had big battles with the mouse to actually be able to point and click. As simple as it may sound now, it was a big thing for most users. A new buzz word rang through the corridors – Graphic User Interface (GUI). Yup, the “Gooey” thing! We’ll talk about GUI seperately a little later.

By the time I started out as a professional developer, things had changed. This was the era of Windows 95 and user friendliness was getting re-defined. Applications were mostly “grey screens”. I remember looking at my first VB5 notepad hello world project and thinking “ewww! greyyyy!”. I actually decided to jump into web design (yeah, “design”) because there was more scope for colour and richness out there. When UI design reqests came through the pipeline, I tried my best to make ‘em as rich as possible! Thank Adobe for Photoshop (I think PS 3 it was..)!

Windows XP got onto most computers and technology evolved to support what came along. Did users want the experience or did the experience just come by because things were now more “technically capable”? It is a “you bite me and I bite you” affair actually, as I see it! And you might have noticed that I used a word – “Experience” a little earlier in this paragraph, well, that was what it was all about – User Experience or UX. We’ll talk about that later too.
The days of colour – GUI:
GUI, simply put, allows users to interact with a program using an input device. This could be a keyboard or a mouse (or anything else fitting in as an Input device). What the user clicked on were little images, called “icons” and other such elements. It became a “Visual language” as it evolved. User’s got used to clicking, dragging and dropping (and doing what not with the mouse!). Interfaces became more interesting to create and much more easy to use.

In the next few years, I actually noticed two groups evolve – people who supported a Rich UI and people who preferred a more minimalist approach. While the first group was driven by high levels of creativity and creative ethics, the second group stood by simplicity and usability. Arguements became rules and concepts that brought about a much bigger change. It evolved the GUI to becoming more of an experience for the user.
The poor get the money:
“User Experience” was the new thing everyone talked about, infact, they still talk about it.
A few features apply to getting a good UX:
- Design needs to be responsive
- Usablity is an important keyword
- Functionality and resource usage needs to find balance
- “Personalized experience” is becoming a major influence

There are many more principles to getting a good user interface to become a complete good user experience. I’ll just talk about the four above for the time being.

• Reponsive Design: By design, I don’t just mean graphical elements, but, I am actually combining that with interaction design as well. Like every developer thinks, design is not just about graphics, its also about interactivity. Design can be simple or complex, but, it needs to respond to the user’s actions and anticipation. The user needs to feel that he has used the application effectively and the application let him use it without any glitches and problems that disallowed normal operations. Taking within the context, of course, the other thing to remember is that the responsiveness will also depend on the user’s state of mind. For example, if your interface has a usual “Tip of the day” screen that shows up everytime the user logs in, and, there isnt an option to turn it off, the next time the user sees it..in a more angry state of mind, he’s just going to get irritated at it. It is not the best example in the book, but, I guess you get the point.
• Usability: I guess this is the most talked about and the most misunderstood concept ever! When applications are designed, people create a map/flow of how the application should function and how users interact with it in patterns. For example, in all screens on an app ABC, the buttons are always centered. They maintain a balance in design and interaction. A user gets used to it easily as all screens are wireframed the same way. It gives it uniformity and makes it easy for the user to anticipate and interact easily. That’s a good thing. Putting it into a nutshell, usability is all about making the application easy to use. Putting usability through various tests, a best practices guide was created. Designers, wireframers, developers and everyone else making up the team could sit at a table and work on a common ground to create applications that was “standards based”, giving the user a good experience overall. I am not going into a greater detail on this. There are books written on it But, just to get it through – the application has to be usable.
• Resource-friendliness: This actually is derived from the two factors described above. To put it simple and plain, a “Hello World” application can’t use 90% of your memory and use resources that shouldn’t be needed. To take a silly example, if your “Hello world” app opens MS Word to actually type out “Hello World” instead of just displaying a messagebox, it would be really pathetic! So, make sure that your application is well thought out and is tested properly on optimum platforms. You can’t lose functionality for finding a balance.
• Personalization: Well, this is becoming hugely important to applications these days. Most application creation guidelines actually stress on it. Users need to have the application behave as they want. It is not just able skinning user interfaces. It is about having a Settings/User preferences panel that would enable the user to turn on/off features or functionality that could be optional. For example, there could be an option in the settings panel enabling the user to turn on/off the ability to minimize to system tray.

With the growing number of devices – mobile and non-mobile, it becomes a challenge to build uniformity in experiences. Screen sizes differ, devices resources differ and interaction points vary. Software houses like Adobe and Microsoft are enabling developers to “build once and deploy on all”. A new breed of applications was born – “Contextual applications“. These are apps that can be used across a number of devices and screens, while maintaining the user experience and content.

I can keep going on and on about this. It would probably become a book. This entry is just a intro of sorts. I’ll probably have a Part-II to this and take it up point by point in greater detail as the days go by.