Posted by Warner Onstine
on October 22, 2009
This post was inspired by “The 7 signs your UI was created by a programmer” post on Voyce.com.
- Your Web UI consists solely of CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) screens – no matter how complex the user interaction is, it can always be boiled down to CRUD. Right?
- Everything is in Times New Roman – who needs a nice-looking font anyway?
- Everything is using the latest JavaScript library with UI functionality – what do you mean not everyone is running the latest FireFox beta?
- It uses tables for layout. Everywhere. Because CSS sucks to debug (on top of that, “Screw the Semantic Web!”).
- The form fields validate, they just don’t have any errors next to them when they fail – because the user should know what they did wrong.
- And forms themselves go on and on and on …
I could only come up with 6, but I’m sure there are many more. Add your favorites in the comments below!
I’m also hoping to turn this into a somewhat regular series on Web Developers and tips and tricks for designing usable, non-ugly interfaces. If you have any tips, let me know in the comments and I’ll be sure to credit you.
Posted by Warner Onstine
on February 26, 2008
Late last year I decided, kind of on a whim, to look around for a new job. I contacted one of my friends and former managers to see if they had any opportunities at VMS. It turned that while they weren’t actively advertising they were looking for people so I submitted my resume plus some of the code that I had done recently.
VMS is an interesting company that looks boring on the surface but are doing some really interesting things. They are basically a marketing company that collects advertising and news for clients. This extends to all types of media (print, TV, radio, etc.) so this has some interesting challenges for data collection and for presenting that data to users in ways that make sense to them.
VMS’s primary platform of choice is currently Tapestry 4 so that makes me happy on a number of levels. While I haven’t done any Tapestry work here yet I look forward to it very shortly.
When I started Scott mentioned that they were also looking for someone to do some UI work for them and that they really liked their last UI person who did a lot of wireframing mockups – which is something I’ve had a lot of experience with. After talking with Scott we decided to have me to half-time UI work and half-time regular programming, which I think fits in to my overall goals of where I want to go. I have been a strong advocate of Usability for a long time but have never had it be part of my job so I am very thrilled to be doing this. Plus it’s a nice change of pace 
.
I will also be looking at some of our stuff to see if we can leverage Groovy in any way (from DSLs to just plain making our jobs easier) and I look forward to evaluating Tapestry 5 soon.
