许多开发人员认为，因为他们会写代码，他们就可以做所有的事情。设计界面是一种完全不同的技能，在我上大学的时候根本没有教过这门技能。这不是与生俱来的。

另一本好书是唐纳德·诺曼的《日常事物的设计》。

真正帮助我改进设计的是找一个开发人员，QA人员、项目经理或任何碰巧路过的人，让他们尝试特定的小部件或屏幕。

当你看到别人第一次使用你的软件时，你会惊奇地发现

在进行UI设计时，以下是我始终牢记的一些事情(到目前为止还不是一个完整的列表):

Communicating a model. The UI is a narrative that explains a mental model to the user. This model may be a business object, a set of relationships, what have you. The visual prominence, spatial placement, and workflow ordering all play a part in communicating this model to the user. For example, a certain kind of list vs another implies different things, as well as the relationship of what's in the list to the rest of the model. In general I find it best to make sure only one model is communicated at a time. Programmers frequently try to communicate more than one model, or parts of several, in the same UI space. Consistency. Re-using popular UI metaphors helps a lot. Internal consistency is also very important. Grouping of tasks. Users should not have to move the mouse all the way across the screen to verify or complete a related sequence of commands. Modal dialogs and flyout-menus can be especially bad in this area. Knowing your audience. If your users will be doing the same activities over and over, they will quickly become power users at those tasks and be frustrated by attempts to lower the initial entry barrier. If your users do many different kinds of activities infrequently, it's best to ensure the UI holds their hand the whole time.

我们是否可以做些什么来重新训练我们的大脑，使其更有效地设计出令人愉悦和有用的演示层?

是的。观察那些试图使用你的软件的用户，不要帮助他们。也被称为可用性测试。

The basic idea of usability testing is that you take someone with a similar background to your target audience, who hasn’t seen your software before and ask them to perform a typical series of tasks. Ideally they should try to speak out loud what they are thinking to give you more insight into their thought processes. You then watch what they do. Critically, you do not assist them, no matter how irresistible the urge. The results can be quite surprising and highly revealing. Usability testing can be very fancy with one way mirrors, video cameras etc, but that really isn’t necessary to get most of the benefits. There is a good description of how to carry out usability tests in Krug’s excellent book Don’t make me think: a common sense guide to web usability. Most of his advice is equally applicable to testing desktop applications.

设计和美学之间有着巨大的差异，它们经常被混淆。

一个漂亮的UI需要艺术或至少是美学技能，包括我自己在内的许多人都无法做到这一点。不幸的是，就像我们在许多重量级的基于flash的api中看到的那样，这是不够的，并且不能使UI可用。

制作可用的ui需要理解人类如何与计算机交互、心理学中的一些问题(例如，菲特定律、希克定律)和其他主题。很少有计算机科学课程为此进行培训。我认识的开发人员中很少有人会选择用户测试书籍而不是JUnit书籍等等。

我们中的许多人也是“核心程序员”，倾向于将ui视为外观，而不是可以成就或破坏项目成功的因素。

此外，大多数UI开发经验都非常令人沮丧。我们可以使用像旧VB那样的玩具GUI构建器，并不得不处理丑陋的胶水代码，或者我们使用无休止地让我们沮丧的api，比如试图在Swing中整理布局。

让我们把你的问题转过来

“ui设计师”注定只设计信息架构和表示层吗?他们是否可以做些什么来重新训练自己的大脑，使其更有效地设计出令人愉悦和高效的系统层?

似乎他们“ui设计师”必须采取完全不同的视角——他们必须从盒子的内部向外看;而不是从盒子外面看。

艾伦·库珀的《囚犯们在管理疯人院》的观点是，我们不可能成功地同时持有两种观点——我们可以学会戴好一顶帽子，但我们不能只是换帽子。