David Temkin has written about The lost art of user interface programming.
I wrote a little bit about this earlier, and agree with a lot that David has to say.
Building good user interfaces is hard work. Very hard work. When I used to work in that area I was always amazed at how screwed up people were (this means: they didn’t think and act like me in front of a computer).
In general open sourcer’s aren’t going to put in the time to do user experience tests and the like, but this may change in the future. Open source software is also normally more:
a) aimed at other geeks [so you can get away with more]
b) heavy on backend code, versus “products”
I hope people take a step back with the new rich interfaces, get back to basics, use the KISS principal, just test real user experience… not their own! You know your app a lot better than John Doe does!
