How important is user interface design?
Disclaimer I am a software engineer as a scuttle fish is a brain surgeon.
I got my ibook on Friday. After lot of bungling on my part, the dispatch lady at Fedex and not cooperating/unhelpful friends, it was a week late. I had my baby in my hands on 26th. I like it a lot. MacOS 10, which runs on ibook is a fine piece of work. It has everything what you expect from a good operating system.
Robustness of Unixes
Usefulness of a good interface (an oxymoron?)
MS Windoze vanishes in puff of shame in front of MacOS. Everything is well organized, and meticulously maintained.

Now this begs a question, how important is a user interface (UI)? Is it really useful to have a neatly polished and clean interface if your underlying code is cool? Let me paraphrase the question, do we need profs, who teach kids ONLY to write cool Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs)?

I will ask you all (probably its me who will read this, if I am lucky, my dog ‘lucky’ will read it in its dreams. Hello ‘lucky’!) a simple question. Have you used all the trappings you get with your VCR/DVD player? If yes you don’t suffer from the blinking “12:00” disorder, which we all normal folk suffer from.

I have read a good write-up on UIs, if you all haven’t read this wonderful essay “In the Beginning was the Command Line” by Neal Stephenson, please read it. It is available on the net for free as in ‘French fries’. He has more informed opinion on this subject rather than the stink I have.

If you still reading this, I really pity you. I will make it easy for you, all I am saying is if your underlying code is good and you take enough trouble to make it easy for the users to use it, it is good enough. You don’t need to get PhD in user interface to design an interface for you.

I once took part in this study where a couple of students are studying the usability of this user interface. The idea of the whole study is measure the time taken to navigate the menu. Is this correct measure of usability? I would say the correct measure how well u could use all the functionalities of the given program?

I guess, if I were a user interface designer I will have this big poster in my cubicle saying “No more blinking 12:00”