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Developer Central Making programs more user-friendly (Page 1 of 2) The program you're working on right now is exciting stuff. You and your peers have spent hours creating complex features that you know your users will love. The program does so many things! There are so many customizable options! Think of something completely unrelated for a moment-- your mom. Does your mother call you when she can't set the VCR? Has your older brother just gotten his family their very first computer, and do they now call you, the family "computer genius," to help them use it? When you told your landlord what you do for a living, did he sigh and say, "So you're the one who makes those programs that are so hard to use! Why, I just got a computer last year...." My own parents can't move the TV without calling me, because they can't figure out how their satellite system connects to their VCR, and how it connects to the TV. It's a fascinating system, I think-- it's as beautiful, as perfect, as running water to me. The signal flows from the satellite dish through the receiver box, then through the VCR, and into the TV. Very Buddhist, I think. But to my parents, it's a bunch of messy wires and cryptically labelled nubs on the backs of boxes. Now, they're not Luddites. My mother has worked with Windows for longer than I have. My father has used adding machines and mail sorters, and can fix cars. (Me: "Where does the oil go?") But those wires behind their TV don't have any correspondence to "turn on the TV, change the channel, and watch 'Murder She Wrote'" to them. Unless your users are program developers, chances are that a lot of them see programs as a bunch of messy buttons and boxes on their computer screens. What does 'Submit' have to do with returning an amortization schedule? your finance software customers may wonder. Or they might not get that far-- they may still be staring at the main screen, which you have cunningly designed with plenty of toolbar buttons for any conceivable task, and wondering which one to click first. How can you make a program that is intuitive and simple? Next >>