Publication Date: December 20, 1996

Emphasizing the User in Your Graphical User Interface

By Sue Mellen

We've all seen them. Web pages or software programs where colors and fonts are uninteresting or unattractive, directions virtually unintelligible, buttons too numerous or unfamiliar to be of any real use, and links so deep and confusing they lead you down long, unmarked trails toward oblivion. When you finally make your way through the mess, you've made a mental note to avoid the site or the application that forced you to waste precious time unscrambling its graphical user interface.

According to the experts, it is fairly easy to create a GUI that's an object of pleasure, rather than pain, for end users. If you keep users' needs firmly in mind during the design and testing process, your GUI—whether it's seen on a Web site, an intranet or the front end of a piece of software—should provide an enjoyable, trouble-free experience, leaving users with only kindly feelings toward your company and its products.

James Hobart, chief executive officer of Classic System Solutions, Inc. in Brentwood, Calif., and an authority on GUI design, says that all good GUIs have a few basic characteristics in common. The top four on his list are:

• Easy access
• Easy navigation
• Clear, easy-to-understand directions and information
• Appropriate and interesting colors and fonts

Two Routes to User-Compatible GUIs

According to Hobart, there are two schools of thought on how best to create GUIs that are at once user-centered and graphically pleasing.

"People interested strictly in information delivery feel GUIs should be very basic and simple, with little concentration on graphics. On the other hand, some of the graphics people are interested in pushing the HTML (hypertext markup language) to its limit on a site. I fall somewhere between the two schools myself."

In fact, Hobart says, there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all GUI design. Different interfaces can, and should, incorporate the basic characteristics in different ways, depending on their intended audiences, he says.

"If you are designing a marketing piece for the Web, you probably want it to be fairly graphically complex in order to stand up to the competition. On the other hand, if you’re building a GUI for a corporate intranet, you should be much more concerned about content. Your goal is to give people within the company the information they need," he says.

Whether simple or complex, your design should conform to your users' idea of an easy ride through your site or your application. One way to smooth out any possible bumps is to conduct usability testing, a process the Internet has made easier than ever before, says Hobart.

"The Internet makes standard usability testing incredibly easy. A simple response mechanism built into your page will allow users to send you instantaneous assessments of your design. In the past, we had to rely on much slower, less direct methods like mail surveys when testing products," he says.

Another way to ensure the creation of an effective GUI, is to put an experienced designer or architect at the wheel of design project, rather than tacking it on to the webmaster or project manager's long list of responsibilities.

"The webmaster is already busy worrying about content and working with a lot of different authors. The GUI is bound to suffer unless someone is giving full attention to the design," Hobart says.

Remember Grandma

Lisa Buyer, a senior design consultant with Vision Enterprises, Inc. of Oak Brook Terrace. Ill., applies what she calls "the Grandma rule" to GUI development. It's her way of ensuring that an end user will find a design fully intelligible.

"You need to be sure your GUI is really written in the language of the user; and by that I don't mean just writing it in English or German. The developer should understand how the user interprets material and then use that information to build a design. You should ask yourself, 'If I were designing this GUI for Grandma, could she follow the directions?'" she advises.

And the best way to determine whether or not Grandma could follow your GUI, she says, is to spend some time leaning over the woman's shoulder. Too often, she says, developers make assumptions about how people do their jobs and interpret information, without ever confirming the validity of their theories. Rather than designing in a vacuum, developers should, whenever possible, spend time on the job with targeted end users, she says.

"If you are doing a design for a new grocery store checking system, you need to go out and stand next to the checkers to see how they really do their jobs. Don't take the word of someone reporting in a meeting how people do their jobs. They won’t be the ones actually using the interface."

If it's not possible to plant a designer on the checkout line, Buyer suggests employing video cameras ("With an employee's full consent, of course") or organizing focus groups of end users who can assess your design in progress and suggest modifications. And this user testing doesn't have to add thousands of dollars to the project budget, she says.

"I'm not talking about an expensive or high-tech approach here. A lot of this can be done by providing users with pencil-and-paper drawings of screen layouts and then asking for their input," Buyer says.

Buyer also teaches developers to conduct Rogerian interviews (based on the work of psychologist Carl Rogers) to help customers communicate their precise needs in a design. This involves listening carefully to clients, then parroting their statements back to them. In this process, users often remember important points that have yet to be addressed, she says.

Both Buyer and Hobart emphasize that every GUI should be built around a user's real—not perceived—needs. Sometimes that means a developer has to be a chameleon capable of changing perspective from designer to psychologist to grocery checker in the blink of an eye.

"Developers are the only people around who need to understand how to do their own jobs and their end users' as well. That's the best way to build an interface that really works," Buyer says.

Sue Mellen writes from Tyngsboro, Mass.

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Resource note: Classic Systems Solutions offers an online design forum through its home page at http://www.classicsys.com.

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James Hobart leads DCI's GUI Design Workshop and Advanced GUI Design Workshop. Lisa Buyer is an on-site instructor for DCI. More information on DCI's on-site training and consulting services is available online, by phone at (508) 470-3870, or by e-mail.

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