Whats more important in a UI? Simplicity, Polish, Innovation, Other?

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Whats more important in a UI? Simplicity, Polish, Innovation, Other?

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AnthonyRusso
Member

In the User Interfaces that you have used, be it in software, web-apps, games, or whatever, what stands out to you as the most important aspect of it?

I believe simplicity is the real winner here, but it seems more and more that polish is what gets rewarded? Innovation usually takes a backseat to both of these as it usually involves being too complicated and 'the masses' don't adapt to it. (Android?)

Case example: the iPhone. Which aspect of it's UI is more important to it do you think? The simplicity, or the polish, or maybe the innovations? Which one of these would be the killer to remove, and which would have to stay for it to have the success that it has had?

Anthony

Posted 2 months ago #
Kosto Ratkovich
Member

Usability would be the first thing, innovation and polish come later.

Posted 2 months ago #
David Pierce
Big Kahuna

I'm with mkosto on this one, and I think the iPhone is a perfect example. It's the only smartphone that just makes sense, and generally works like you think it will. Usability is key, but the other things are important too.

How I, personally, rank the characteristics you list (and this is just me):

- Usability
- Simplicity
- Polish
- Innovations (This is last only because it's really not needed - if you do the same things as everyone else, only better and more easily, you'll still win).

Good question, I'm curious what other people think too.

Posted 2 months ago #
MsJosay
Member

I agree with David on this one, usability is key. I think usability and simplicity go hand in hand. Typically something that is easy to use is simple. As technology progresses devices get faster and load times shorten. Nowadays 1 minute for a computer to boot up seems like a lifetime. That being said consumers have little to no patience to learn a complicated new UI even if the program is innovative and meets their needs. If a consumer can't use a UI or has to put a lot of extra work into learning how to use it they will move on to something easier.

I'm a perfect example of this - I recently wanted to do some photo editing and had just acquired a copy of PhotoShop, after sitting down and going through the menus and some tutorials for a few minutes I realized it was going to take me longer to learn how to do what I wanted to do than it was for me to actually do it with a simpler photo editing program (like Picasa). So I moved my attention from PhotoShop to Picasa. I'm not saying that some of the more advanced software isn't useful nor am I saying that everyone is like me and lacks the patience to learn to use software with a more complicated UI but I think the majority of consumers are as I described above - impatient and looking for the most "usable" software.

Posted 2 months ago #

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