Arguing about usability and "prettyness"

Question

As a UI guy (coding and designing user interfaces) I often find myself in the odd situation arguing about the quality of userinterfaces with programmers and other "laymen".

I find it somewhat hard to argue about things like colors, icons or layout and it doesn't seem that there is a factual right or wrong. But still - without having a convincing argument I still know (i.e. feel) that sometimes a solution is just wrong. What is your approach to this? Do you let costly usability test decide or even the customer? Do you educate yourself in usability engineering? Do you know of good books (like Joel Spolsky's "User Interface Design for Programmers") that deliver arguments? Do you avoid such discussions?

Answer 1

Edward Tufte is always a good source. Mark Miller did a podcast and a screencast about this for .Net Rocks!. He actually went into the science behind UI principles like the principle of least effective differance.

Answer 2

Ultimately the customer makes the decision because the customer pays the bills. However, the customer is usually paying me because they believe that I have skills and abilities that they don't possess. Typically I'll try to explain to them why I believe a particular layout or color choice makes sense from a design perspective. If I have a good enough reason, beyond personal preference, that usually does the trick. If it doesn't, then I go the customer's way. Sometimes, if I know that the customer will really hate what they "want" I'll just avoid the argument/discussion completely and do it their way and let them tell me to change it back.

One thing that I will say. Often these discussions end up with yet a third solution that is better than my original. Being forced to really think through my choices to defend them often results in me thinking of ways to solve the problem that addresses the customer's perspective better than the original design.

As far as color schemes go, you always hope to have a customer with good taste. Sadly, that doesn't always happen. And, yes, sometimes I've had to put together a solution that doesn't make it into my portfolio for this reason.

Answer 3

A lot of my clients are small. They don't have the money for a usability/UI expert so we make due. They understand my limitations and we both do our best to bring a little common sense to the table - understanding that we're building good-enough versus the best (UI-wise).

In my experience, large clients have the same attitude toward internal apps. It's only when you build something to sell that people are willing to spend extra money on the problem.

For myself, I believe there's no good reason to be completely ignorant. I do spend a little time reading and puttering. I've found good material with:

• Steve Krug - his book, Don't Make Me Think!, is aging but still pretty good.
• Donald Norman - writes about a lot more than UI design. He gets you seeing and thinking about design everywhere.
• Jakob Nielsen - can be a little extreme. Still, he's not an idiot. He's thought about design (especially web design) a lot and makes some great observations.