吃自己的狗粮实际上并不是最好的方式。缺乏对用户关注的关注，虽然这是事实，但也不是故事的全部。同样，随着您的专业知识的增长，您也会逐渐远离正常的用户关注点。我认识的大多数开发人员都想在开发解决问题的软件方面做得很好。

这种脱节发生在想象力的失败。我们人类没有能力思考所有的可能性和组合。当然，我们试图用“更好的”方法来克服这个问题。

我发现唯一有效的方法就是让自己置身于接收用户反馈的火线上。通过这种方式，我了解到我正在解决的问题，不仅仅是一次，而是在用户使用我的软件的过程中持续不断地进行。

这不是一个简单的解决方案。你不仅要成为一名优秀的程序员，还要擅长X，因为X是你试图解决的任何问题。通过擅长X，你可以获得必要的经验来理解可能性和局限性。你可以开始在你的代码中考虑到这一点，从而在你提供的功能和UI设计中产生更精致的软件。

这不是重新训练你的大脑，而是获得有效解决问题所需的经验。如果你要做的是像Stack Overflow这样的全新游戏，你就必须负责用户反馈才能获得游戏体验。

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。

UI设计很难

对于这个问题:

为什么UI设计对大多数开发者来说如此困难?

试着问相反的问题:

为什么编程对大多数UI设计师来说如此困难?

编写UI和设计UI需要不同的技能和不同的心态。UI设计对于大多数开发人员来说是困难的，就像编写代码对于大多数设计师来说是困难的一样。

编码很难。设计也很难。很少有人两者都做得很好。优秀的UI设计师很少编写代码。他们甚至不知道怎么做，但他们仍然是优秀的设计师。那么，为什么优秀的开发者觉得自己要对UI设计负责呢?

了解更多关于UI设计的知识会让你成为更好的开发人员，但这并不意味着你应该对UI设计负责。对于设计师来说，情况正好相反:知道如何编写代码将使他们成为更好的设计师，但这并不意味着他们应该负责编写UI代码。

如何更好地进行UI设计

对于那些想要更好地进行UI设计的开发者，我有3条基本建议:

Recognize design as a separate skill. Coding and design are separate but related. UI design is not a subset of coding. It requires a different mindset, knowledge base, and skill group. There are people out there who focus on UI design. Learn about design. At least a little bit. Try to learn a few of the design concepts and techniques from the long list below. If you are more ambitious, read some books, attend a conference, take a class, get a degree. There are lot of ways to learn about design. Joel Spolky's book on UI design is a good primer for developers, but there's a lot more to it and that's where designers come into the picture. Work with designers. Good designers, if you can. People who do this work go by various titles. Today, the most common titles are User Experience Designer (UXD), Information Architect (IA), Interaction Designer(ID), and Usability Engineer. They think about design as much as you think about code. You can learn a lot from them, and they from you. Work with them however you can. Find people with these skills in your company. Maybe you need to hire someone. Or go to some conferences, attend webinars, and spend time in the UXD/IA/ID world.

这里有一些具体的事情你可以学习。不要什么都学。如果你了解以下所有内容，你就可以称自己为交互设计师或信息架构师。从清单顶部的事情开始。专注于特定的概念和技能。然后向下延伸。如果你真的喜欢这些东西，就把它当做职业道路吧。许多开发人员转向管理，但用户体验设计是另一种选择。

Learn fundamental design concepts. You should know about affordances, visibility, feedback, mappings, Fitt's law, poka-yokes, and more. I recommend reading The Design of Everyday Things (Don Norman) and Universal Principles of Design (Lidwell, Holden, & Butler) Learn about user experience. This is becoming the umbrella term for the human-centered design of web sites, applications, and any other digital artifact. The classic primer here is The elements of User Experience (Jesse James Garrett). You can get an overview and the first few chapters from the author's site. Learn to sketch designs. Sketching is fast way to explore design options and find the right design, whereas usability testing is about getting the design right. Paper prototyping is fast, cheap, and effective during the early design stages. Much faster than coding a digital prototype. The key text here is Sketching User Experience: Getting the design right and the right design (Bill Buxton). Sketching is a particularly useful skill when working with IA/ID/UX designers. Your collaboration will be more effective. For a good primer on how and why designers sketch, watch the presentation How to be a UX team of one by Leah Buley from the 2008 IA Summit. Learn paper prototyping. The fastest way to iteratively test an interface before you write code. Different from sketching and usability testing. The definitive book here is Paper Prototyping (Carolyn Snyder). You can get a good DVD on this from the Nielsen Norman Group. Learn usability testing. Discount testing is easy and effective. But for many UIs, usability is hard to do well. You can learn the basics quickly, but good usability people are invaluable. If you want a book, the classic is The Handbook of Usability Testing (Jeffrey Rubin). It's older but offers thorough coverage of lab-based testing. The famous starter book is Don't Make Me Think (2nd Ed) (Steve Krug). I caution people about this one: Krug makes it sound easier than it is. But it is a good starting point. The user research books listed in the next point also cover this topic. And you can find piles about it online. Learn about information architecture. The main book here is Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (3rd) (Louis Rosenfeld & Peter Morville). A good starter book is Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web (Christina Wodtke). For more, visit the Information Architecture Institute or attend the annual Information Architecture Summit. Learn about interaction design. The main book here is The Essentials of Interaction Design (3rd) (Alan Cooper, et al). A good starter book is Designing for interaction (Dan Saffer). For more, visit the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) or attend the annual Interaction Design conference. Learn fundamentals of graphic design. Graphic design is not UI design, but concepts from graphic design can improve an interface. Graphic design introduces design principles for the visual presentation of information, such as proximity, alignment, and small multiples. I recommend reading The non-designer's design book (Robin Williams) and Envisioning Information (Edward Tufte) Learn to do user research. Where usability tests an interface, user research tries to model users and their tasks through personas, scenarios, user journeys, and other documents. It's about understanding users and what they do, then using that to inform the design instead of guessing. Some techniques are interviews, surveys, diary studies, and cart sorting. Good books on this are Observing the User Experience (Mike Kuniavsky) and Understanding Your Users (Courage & Baxter) Learn to do field research. Watching people in the lab under artificial conditions helps (ie: usability), but there is nothing like watching people use your code in context: their home, their office, or wherever they use it. Goes by various names, including ethnography, field studies, and contextual inquiry. Here is a good primer on field research. Two of the better known books here are Rapid Contextual Design (Karen Holtzblatt et al) and User and task analysis for interface design (Hackos & Redish). Read UX design web sites. Some of the big ones are Boxes & Arrows, UX Mag, UX Matters, and Digital Web magazine. Use UI pattern libraries. There are patterns for interfaces. For web sites, I recommend The Design of Sites, 2nd ed (Van Duyne, et al) and Homepage usability: 50 websites deconstructed (Jakob Nielsen & Marie Tahir). For desktop applications I recommend Designing interfaces (Jennifer Tidwell), and for web applications I recommend Designing Web Interfaces: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interactions (Bill Scott & Theresa Neil). Online you should check Welie pattern library, UI patterns, and Web UI patterns. Attend UX design conferences. Some good annual conferences are: Information Architecture Summit, Interaction '09 (IxDA), User Interface, and UX week. Attend a workshop or webinar. You can take workshops, webinars, and online courses. This is far from a comprehensive list, but you might try the UIE virtual seminars, Adaptive Path virtual seminars, and UX webinars from Rosenfeld Media. Get a degree. A graduate degree in HCI is one approach, but these programs are mostly about writing coding. If you want to learn about the design of digital artifacts and devices, then you want a graduate program that's not in CS. Some options include Interaction Design at Carnegie Mellon, the d-School at Stanford, the ITP program at NYU, and Information Architecture & Knowledge Management at Kent State (disclosure: I'm on faculty at Kent; we are seeing more and more people with CS degrees moving into UX design instead of management, which is interesting, because management is the traditional path for developers who want to move away from writing code while staying in their field). There are many more programs. Each has their own perspective, areas of emphasis, and technical expectations. Some come out of the arts and visual design, others out of library and information science, and some from CS. Most are hybrids, but every hybrid has deeper roots in one or more fields. If this interests you, look around and try to understand the differences between these programs. Some offer online courses and certificate programs in addition to full-fledged degrees.

为什么UI设计很难

优秀的UI设计很难，因为它涉及到两种截然不同的技能:

A deep understanding of the machine. People in this group worry about code first, people second. They have deep technological knowledge and skill. We call them developers, programmers, engineers, and so forth. A deep understanding of people and design: People in this group worry about people first, code second. They have deep knowledge of how people interact with information, computers, and the world around them. We call them user experience designers, information architects, interaction designers, usability engineers, and so forth.

这就是这两个群体——开发者和设计师之间的本质区别:

Developers make it work. They implement the functionality on your TiVo, your iPhone, your favorite website, etc. They make sure it actually does what it is supposed to do. Their highest priority is making it work. Designers make people love it. They figure out how to interact with it, how it should look, and how it should feel. They design the experience of using the application, the web site, the device. Their highest priority is making you fall in love with what developers make. This is what is meant by user experience, and it's not the same as brand experience.

此外，编程和设计需要不同的心态，而不仅仅是不同的知识和技能。优秀的UI设计需要两种心态、两种知识基础和两种技能。而掌握其中任何一种都需要数年时间。

开发人员会发现UI设计很难，就像UI设计师会发现写代码很难一样。

当开发人员考虑UI时，他们通常会想到他们可以用于这个或这个任务的完美小部件(这里的小部件指的是文本区域、组合框、交互式Ajax搜索字段……)UI，尤其是HCI，应该在较低的层次上考虑。将关于UI的反思分为4个步骤是很有趣的:

任务和概念模型:从开发人员的角度来看，这是最难以理解的。你必须从反思中抽象出你对未来平台的所有想法，以及你可以使用的语言。[Paterno, 97]是该领域的参考文献。将任务定义为树，其中任务有子任务。 下面是一个导出任务的示例。

然后定义抽象UI:这是关于将任务和子任务分组到工作空间。 具体的UI:你现在可以决定使用哪个交互器。现在您应该考虑平台(大屏幕、PDA、移动电话……)。这是钥匙。您的任务模型和抽象UI可以在多个平台中分解。 最后的UI，用选定的编程语言实现。

UI设计与其说是科学，不如说是艺术，它需要你对用户的理解和与他们感同身受的能力。

这和整天对着电脑说话是完全不同的。

我认为人们并不总是意识到这一点。

这里有一个小小的自我测试:看看FamFamFam的丝绸图标。考虑一下在您编写的上一个应用程序中选择哪个图标来表示各种功能。如果花超过十分钟的时间来做这件事让你的眼睛开始呆滞，那么UI设计可能不适合你。

阅读苹果人机界面指南。