我用的是我所谓的祖母测试。

如果你亲爱的老祖母不会用它，那就有问题了。 假设她知道这个程序是关于什么的，例如，知道如何做税务，并试图使用Quicken。

我认为主要的问题与不同的才能或技能无关。主要的问题是，作为一名开发人员，您对应用程序是做什么的以及它是如何做的了解太多，并且您自动地从具有这些知识的人的角度来设计您的UI。

而用户通常一开始对应用程序一无所知，也不需要了解它的内部工作原理。

不使用你拥有的知识是非常困难的，几乎是不可能的——这就是为什么UI不应该由开发它背后应用程序的人来设计。

我在UI设计方面做了什么? 注意!

这就像当你在新闻上看到图表或电子公交标志时，你会想‘他们是怎么得到这些数据的?他们是用原始sql还是用LINQ?(或者你也可以在这里加入自己的极客好奇心)。

你需要开始这样做，但是要有各种视觉元素。

但就像学习一门新语言一样，如果你不全身心地投入进去，你就永远学不会。

从另一个答案中我写道:

学会观察，真正地观察你周围的世界。为什么我喜欢那个UI而讨厌这个UI ?为什么在这家餐厅的菜单上很难找到面食?我还没看那牌子上的字就知道是什么意思了。为什么呢?那本书的封面怎么这么难看?学会花时间思考为什么你会对各种视觉元素做出这样的反应，然后把它应用到你的工作中。

登陆Slashdot，阅读任何与苹果有关的文章的评论。你会发现很多人都在谈论苹果的产品没有什么特别之处，把iPod和iPhone的成功归因于人们想要赶时髦。他们通常会浏览功能列表，并指出他们所做的一切都是早期MP3播放器或智能手机所没有的。

还有一些人喜欢iPod和iPhone，因为它们可以简单、轻松地满足用户的需求，而不需要参考使用手册。它的界面非常直观、容易记忆和发现。我对MacOSX的用户界面不像以前的版本那么喜欢，我认为它们已经放弃了一些有用的东西，而倾向于浮夸，但iPod和iPhone是卓越设计的例子。

If you are in the first camp, you don't think the way the average person does, and therefore you are likely to make bad user interfaces because you can't tell them from good ones. This doesn't mean you're hopeless, but rather that you have to explicitly learn good interface design principles, and how to recognize a good UI (much as somebody with Asperger's might need to learn social skills explicitly). Obviously, just having a sense of a good UI doesn't mean you can make one; my appreciation for literature, for example, doesn't seem to extend to the ability (currently) to write publishable stories.

所以，试着培养一种好的UI设计的感觉。这不仅仅延伸到软件领域。唐·诺曼的《日常事物的设计》是一本经典，还有其他的书。获取一些成功的UI设计的例子，并充分利用它们来感受其中的不同之处。认识到你可能不得不学习一种新的思考问题的方式，并享受它。

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。

“好的UI设计”其实是两个问题:

获得正确的设计 正确的设计

两者都是难题。以我的经验来看，这两件事应该并行进行，这样才能避免在项目后期出现糟糕的惊喜(“为什么我们在IE8中拖放的速度非常慢??”你说它无法修复是什么意思??”)

为了得到正确的设计，你必须探索各种可能性。书籍可以引导你尝试对你的情况最有意义的事情-经验当然更好。此外，你绝对需要来自真实用户的反馈——否则你怎么才能发现设计已经是正确的呢?)你当然看不出来。继续阅读!)

“使设计正确”是下一个问题，因为这意味着必须执行你认为合适的设计。

那些“用户体验/图形用户界面”的事情是如此困难，因为找到正确的答案包括理解人类想要什么——他们不能客观地告诉你，而你也不能从“外部”找到。这意味着(经验)引导的试错方法是唯一可行的方法。

为了更清楚地回答你的问题:

为什么优秀的UI设计对某些人来说如此困难 重击

对于硬核开发人员来说，一个大问题是，他们对软件如何工作的理解与用户认为它如何工作的理解是非常不同的(例如，URL“www.stackoverflow.com”应该写成“com.stackoverflow.com”，如果你知道DNS如何工作的话。但试着销售一个浏览器，它期望url:))。

作为旁注:我建议你着眼于“体验设计”而不是“用户界面设计”，但这是另一个故事。