Tuesday, January 04, 2005

User interface design II

The end-user experience is something that is often neglected in the rush to produce slick-looking interfaces.

As I said in a previous post, kulula.com has one of the best user interfaces on the web. Gmail and FNB's online banking site also score highly, because they make navigation simple and hide the complexity of their underlying logic. SAA's website has improved since my last post on the topic.

On the other hand, there are many programs and websites that have look slick at first glance, but suffer from awful performance and have ugly, cluttered, headache-inducing interfaces, that, if tested with actual users (as opposed to managers who won't really be using the system), would be rejected.