Hiring your next user interface designer

by Karel Thönissen

Who should design the user interface for your next application or website? A programmer? A graphic designer? A master of arts proficient in writing English? The psychologist or specialist in human factors?

Programmers should be involved in the construction of the application or website, because they are the people constructing it. They should provide their input from the technical angle. However, user interface design is not their field of expertise. Let programmers design your user interface and you might end up with something that is graphically ugly, uses a language that only bares a resemblance to English, requires the user to twist his mind, but that is a showcase of technological wit. You also need the latest version of your OS, various toolkits and database installed. Unfortunately, nobody is interested in that. The application is used because a job needs to be done.

Graphic designers are tainted with a similar trait. Their applications and websites are beautiful eye candy. Without a 47 cm (why we use metric) monitor, the latest Flash plug-in, the latest graphic accelerator card, and a T1-line to the internet, your are lost. Very nice, but unusable for the poor old user with Windows-98 on a 31 cm CRT over a dial-up connection to the Internet. Just because every graphic designer has fancy equipment, does not mean that every user has similar equipment.

A master of arts perhaps? Maybe, if it is the type of person that I will reveal later. However, being able to write clear and nice English is a good thing and certainly an asset to the design, it just is not enough. Technical, graphic, and psychological issues are just as important, so why ask this specialist to assume the role of user interface designer?

So a psychologist perhaps or a specialist in ergonomy? Again, good, but not quite good enough.

So then, who is it: the programmer, the writer, the psychologist or the graphic designer? Drum rolls... And the winner is:.... None of the above.

You hire a stage director.

Really, this is the professional in the best position to become a good user interface designer. Of course, a lot of his knowledge and experience is irrelevant to the design of user interfaces. The history of drama is probably not very useful. However, consider what a stage director's job entails: tell a complex plot with several layers to the audience in say one and a half hour using a confined space, minimal props and no presupposed knowledge. His task is to tell the story using all his means so that the user does not lose grip with the developments. The stage director's primary concern are not the special effects (that is for the SE-technicians), not the natural beauty of the prose (that is for the original author), not the graphic quality of the decor (that is for the stage builders), not even the quality of the acting: it is ordering the scenes in such a way that the drama as a whole makes sense.

By now, I may have insulted programmers, writers, graphic artists, psychologists, stage directors, actors, special effects technicians, stage builders, and you. But I have brought my point across when you understand that designing user interfaces should concentrate on the interaction between the user and the program. This interactive conversation should make sense to the user in the light of the task that he wants to perform. The user interface designer should be a story teller, a drama director, a script writer, rather than a professional of any of the abovementioned types.

To take away some of the insult that I may have induced upon some of you: telling bedtime stories to your little toddler can now be considered as professional training, providing you with additional tax deduction opportunities (-8.