Starting a Tech Business: A Practical Guide for Anyone Creating or Designing Applications or Software

The View

See Me, Feel Me³

The View is what the users see on the screen.⁴ It's probably the most intuitive component since we're all used to looking at applications. You can measure your success on the View component in a simple way by how well you enable the users to do what they want to do. Though the discipline of design pervades every aspect of the product, average people off the street probably think about things like the View when they hear this term. They probably think of the whole thing as an artistic, inspiration-driven process: the “I see pink” school of thought. Though the design of the front end View is art and science, it's mostly science.

You can prepare yourself for success. (I've recommended a few books at the end of this chapter on visual communication and human-computer interaction.) One of the most valuable lessons is to clarify your intent. If a silver bullet exists for getting good product out the door, it's making your priorities clear, intuitive, and disciplined. Being disciplined in your priorities means deciding what's important to the users and removing everything else or tucking it away. For example, while Apple allows you to do around 10 things with the iPod, 100 were probably under serious consideration. Bad product and poor design are frequently the result of designing for the 99th percentile of things a user might want to do, throwing in the proverbial kitchen sink on features, making it the user's responsibility to find what they want. Users will ...