部分原因在于，UI设计比看起来要难得多，就像编程比设计师看起来要难得多一样。这两个人对完全不同的事情的担忧程度大不相同，而这一点，除了所需的方法和技能明显不同之外，导致他们关注彼此看不见的问题。

I've found that it helps to describe my app and how to use it to someone without any visual tools whatsoever. It helps focus on what is actually necessary and important and feeds back what can be comprehended quickly by another person. I can do this even before I have a line of code, so it's very cheap to do and doesn't require any artistic skills. The other advantage is that verbalizing the app gets parts of my brain working that otherwise would remain dormant while coding and I can start to "see" the app work (or not work) as I talk.

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。

duffymo提醒了我为什么:许多程序员认为“*设计”=“美术”。

好的UI设计绝对不具有艺术性。它遵循坚实的原则，如果你有时间做研究，可以用数据来支持。

我认为所有程序员需要做的就是花时间学习原理。我认为我们的本性是尽可能地应用最佳实践，无论是在代码中还是在布局中。我们所需要做的就是让自己意识到我们工作这方面的最佳实践是什么。

让我直接说:

改善这一点并不是从指导方针开始的。首先要重新定义对软件的看法。

大多数硬核开发人员对他们软件的用户几乎没有同情心。他们不知道用户如何思考，用户如何建立他们使用的软件模型，以及他们通常如何使用计算机。

当专家和外行发生冲突时，这是一个典型的问题:一个正常人怎么会如此愚蠢，不明白专家10年前的理解?

首先要承认的一个事实是，几乎所有有经验的开发者都难以掌握:

正常人对软件的概念和你有很大的不同。他们完全不懂编程。一个也没有。零。他们根本不在乎。他们甚至不认为他们需要关心。如果你强迫他们，他们会删除你的程序。

这对开发者来说是难以置信的残酷。他为自己生产的软件感到自豪。他喜欢每一个特征。他可以告诉你它背后的代码是如何工作的。也许他甚至发明了一种令人难以置信的聪明算法，使它比以前快了50%。

用户并不关心。

真是个白痴。

许多开发人员无法忍受与普通用户一起工作。他们因为缺乏技术知识而感到沮丧。这就是为什么大多数开发人员回避，认为用户一定是白痴。

事实并非如此。

如果一个软件开发人员买了一辆车，他希望它能平稳运行。他通常不关心轮胎压力，机械微调是重要的，使它运行那样。在这方面他不是专家。如果他买了一辆没有微调功能的车，他就会把它退回去，再买一辆他想要的。

Many software developers like movies. Well-done movies that spark their imagination. But they are not experts in producing movies, in producing visual effects or in writing good movie scripts. Most nerds are very, very, very bad at acting because it is all about displaying complex emotions and little about analytics. If a developer watches a bad film, he just notices that it is bad as a whole. Nerds have even built up IMDB to collect information about good and bad movies so they know which ones to watch and which to avoid. But they are not experts in creating movies. If a movie is bad, they'll not go to the movies (or not download it from BitTorrent ;)

所以归结起来就是:把普通用户当成专家来回避是一种无知。因为在那些他们不是专家的领域(有这么多)，他们希望其他领域的专家已经考虑过使用他们产品或服务的普通人。

What can you do to remedy it? The more hardcore you are as a programmer, the less open you will be to normal user thinking. It will be alien and clueless to you. You will think: I can't imagine how people could ever use a computer with this lack of knowledge. But they can. For every UI element, think about: Is it necessary? Does it fit to the concept a user has of my tool? How can I make him understand? Please read up on usability for this, there are many good books. It's a whole area of science, too.

啊，在你说出来之前，是的，我是苹果粉;)

“从屏幕的两面进行设计”是程序员发现UI设计困难的一个非常简单但深刻的原因:程序员被训练成从边缘情况考虑问题，而UI设计师则被训练成从常见情况或用法考虑问题。

因此，从一个世界到另一个世界当然是困难的，如果其中一个的默认训练是完全相反的。

如果你读过《为什么软件很糟糕》这本书，你就会看到Platt的答案，这是一个简单的答案:

开发人员更喜欢控制而不是用户友好性 一般人更喜欢用户友好而不是控制

但你的问题的另一个答案是“为什么牙科对某些开发者来说如此困难?”UI设计最好由UI设计师来完成。

http://dotmad.net/blog/2007/11/david-platt-on-why-software-sucks/