Good user interfaces matter. In fact, they matter a great deal to the success of a program. While a program’s design and technology affects its overall capability and performance, as far as the user is concerned, the user interface is the program. If the user interface isn’t good, the program isn’t good. Don’t expect users to look behind a bad user interface to see what lies beneath. They won’t.
How many Microsoft Windows software products on the market that have bad user interfaces have been commercial successes? I am familiar with only one: a popular high-end image-processing program (which shall remain anonymous). Ask anyone who uses this program how they like it and you will get the same response: love the program, hate the interface. But this program is fairly unusual. It provides complex image manipulation that is unavailable in other programs, and its awkward interface allows for batch processing that its users love. As a good rule of thumb, if there are several programs competing in a particular market segment, the winner will be the one with the best user interface.
The target audience for this book is Windows programmers, specifically those programming Windows applications and utilities using MFC, the Windows API, or Microsoft Visual Basic. Many of the ideas I present also apply to other types of programming, such as programs designed for other operating systems, Web pages, and thin-client Windows DNA (Distributed interNet Applications architecture) programs, but I have not gone out of my way to address these specific subjects. Likewise, many of the ideas I present should be useful to software development team members other than programmers, such as managers, quality assurance testers, and technical writers, but again I haven’t gone out of my way to address these specific audiences.
