Are you delivering an application from the 90′s?

At this point, we all should know about the importance of a UI Design and Usability in a Web 2.0 application, technology alone will never get the user acceptance and subsequent marketability without it. We have to agree that UI Design/Usability is that’s the face of the product and that’s how the user will evaluate the software, they will never know and don’t care what happen when they grabs the mouse and click that button.

We all have seen a lot of well architected projects fail because the the UI is ugly, cumbersome, is not easy to use, or gets the typical feedback from the user  “the previous app was better”, the typical reason? A bad User Interface Design. Most of the time this happens for two reasons, one is because the development team does not have a experienced modern UI/UX guy. A lot of projects do not take the UI seriously and that think that “UI Design is just picking a nice color and anybody can do that”, and do not hire somebody to do that job, letting the developers, business analysts, QA or experience users to guide the UI. The other reason is hiring the wrong UI designer. Some years ago when applications were just flat, design on HTML, PowerPoint or even just on a peace of paper was OK, but not any more, applications are a lot more interactive and applications designers need to get more technical.

To be a UI Designer you definitely need a big talent, but to be an UI Application Designer you need more than that, you need to be technical. Thanks to how technology has changed during the last few years, to be a User Interface Designer, Interaction Designer or a User Interface Architect, you need a lot more than that talent, good taste and the coolest Mac. Web applications are way more powerful that before, we have nice and powerful Javascipt libraries, Flash, Flex, Siverlight, AJAX, .NET, just to name a few, and if your designer said “Javascript? Flex? ahhh?” there is no way he can design a application exploding current technologies, making available useful features to the end user, and probably your application will look like an application from the 90’s.

I am not saying that a UI Designer needs to know every little detail about the new technologies, but  he needs to know what is possible and what is not from the technology prospective and make it part of his design, because the developer will not make that decision for him.

So, if you leading a project, please get somebody with the right UI skills, if you are a UI Designer and are/want to get into the application design, please get a little technical and help the UI Designers to get the credit than thy deserve.

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