用户界面不像一层薄薄的油漆，是事后才可以涂上去的。它需要从一开始就存在，并基于真正的研究。当然，有大量可用性研究可用。它不仅需要在一开始就存在，它还需要构成你制作软件的核心原因:世界上存在一些差距，一些问题，它需要变得更可用和更有效。

软件不是为了它自己而存在的。软件存在的原因是为了人们。这绝对是荒谬的，甚至试图提出一个新的软件的想法，而不理解为什么人们会需要它。然而，这种情况一直在发生。

在编写每一行代码之前，您应该先检查界面的纸质版本，并在真人身上进行测试。这有点奇怪和愚蠢，它最适合孩子们，有人扮演“电脑”。

界面需要利用我们自然的认知能力。穴居人会怎么使用你的程序?例如，我们已经进化到非常擅长追踪移动的物体。这就是为什么使用物理模拟的界面，比如iphone，比即时发生变化的界面效果更好。

We are good at certain kinds of abstraction, but not others. As programmers, we're trained to do mental gymnastics and backflips to understand some of the weirdest abstractions. For instance, we understand that a sequence of arcane text can represent and be translated into a pattern of electromagnetic state on a metal platter, which when encountered by a carefully designed device, leads to a sequence of invisible events that occur at lightspeed on an electronic circuit, and these events can be directed to produce a useful outcome. This is an incredibly unnatural thing to have to understand. Understand that while it's got a perfectly rational explanation to us, to the outside world, it looks like we're writing incomprehensible incantations to summon invisible sentient spirits to do our bidding.

普通人能理解的抽象概念包括地图、图表和符号。小心符号，因为符号是一种非常脆弱的人类概念，需要有意识的精神努力来解码，直到学会符号。

The trick with symbols is that there has to be a clear relationship between the symbol, and the thing it represents. The thing it represents either has to be a noun, in which case the symbol should look VERY MUCH like the thing it represents. If a symbol is representing a more abstract concept, that has to be explained IN ADVANCE. See the inscrutable unlabled icons in msword's, or photoshop's toolbar, and the abstract concepts they represent. It has to be LEARNED that the crop tool icon in photoshop means CROP TOOL. it has to be understood what CROP even means. These are prerequisites to correctly using that software. Which brings up an important point, beware of ASSUMED knowledge.

我们大约在4岁左右才能获得理解地图的能力。我记得我曾经在什么地方读到过，黑猩猩在六七岁左右获得了理解地图的能力。

The reason that guis have been so successful to begin with, is that they changed a landscape of mostly textual interfaces to computers, to something that mapped the computer concepts to something that resembled a physical place. Where guis fail in terms of usability, is where they stop resembling something you'd see in real life. There are invisible, unpredictable, incomprehensible things that happen in a computer that bare no resemblance to anything you'd ever see in the physical world. Some of this is necessary, since there'd be no point in just making a reality simulator- The idea is to save work, so there has to be a bit of magic. But that magic has to make sense, and be grounded in an abstraction that human beings are well adapted to understanding. It's when our abstractions start getting deep, and layered, and mismatched with the task at hand that things break down. In other words, the interface doesn't function as a good map for the underlying software.

有很多书。我读过的两本，因此可以推荐给你，一本是唐纳德·诺曼的《日常事物的设计》，另一本是杰夫·拉斯金的《人机界面》。

I also reccomend a course in psychology. "The Design of Every day Things" talks about this a bit. A lot of interfaces break down because of a developer's "folk understanding" of psychology. This is similar to "folk physics". An object in motion stays in motion doesn't make any sense to most people. "You have to keep pushing it to keep it in motion!" thinks the physics novice. User testing doesn't make sense to most developers. "You can just ask the users what they want, and that should be good enough!" thinks the psychology novice.

我推荐菲利普·津巴多主持的PBS系列纪录片《发现心理学》。如果做不到，那就找一本好的物理教科书。贵的那种。不是你在Borders书店里找到的低级小说自助废话，而是你只能在大学图书馆里找到的厚精装书。这是一个必要的基础。没有它，你也可以做出好的设计，但你只能凭直觉理解正在发生的事情。读一些好书会给你一个好的视角。

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。

一个有用的框架是积极地考虑你在设计一个沟通过程时所做的事情。在非常真实的意义上，你的界面是一种语言，用户必须使用它来告诉计算机该做什么。这导致我们考虑以下几点:

Does the user already speak this language? Using a highly idiosyncratic interface is like communicating in a language you've never spoken before. So if your interface must be idiosyncratic at all, it had best introduce itself with the simplest of terms and few distractions. On the other hand, if your interface uses idioms that the user is accustomed to, they'll gain confidence from the start. The enemy of communication is noise. Auditory noise interferes with spoken communication; visual noise interferes with visual communication. The more noise you can cut out of your interface, the easier communicating with it will be. As in human conversation, it's often not what you say, it's how you say it. The way most software communicates is rude to a degree that would get it punched in the face if it were a person. How would you feel if you asked someone a question and they sat there and stared at you for several minutes, refusing to respond in any other way, before answering? Many interface elements, like progress bars and automatic focus selection, have the fundamental function of politeness. Ask yourself how you can make the user's day a little more pleasant.

实际上，很难确定程序员认为界面交互是什么，除了交流过程之外，但问题可能是它根本没有被认为是任何东西。

说程序在UI设计方面很糟糕是没有抓住重点。问题的关键在于，大多数开发人员所接受的正式培训深入了技术。人机交互不是一个简单的话题。这不是我可以通过提供简单的一行语句让您意识到“哦，如果我使用x而不是y，用户将更有效地使用这个应用程序”来“思想融合”的东西。

这是因为你忽略了UI设计的一部分。人类的大脑。为了理解如何设计UI，你必须理解人的思想如何与机器交互。我在明尼苏达大学上过一门关于这个话题的很棒的课程，是一位心理学教授教的。它被命名为“人机交互”。这描述了UI设计如此复杂的许多原因。

因为心理学是基于相关性而不是因果关系，你永远无法证明UI设计方法总是适用于任何给定的情况。你可以认为许多用户会发现某个特定的UI设计很吸引人或高效，但你不能证明它总是具有普遍性。

此外，UI设计中有两个部分似乎被许多人忽略了，那就是美学吸引力和功能工作流。如果你追求100%的美感，人们肯定会买你的产品。但我非常怀疑美学能否减少用户的挫败感。

有几本关于这个主题的好书和课程可供选择(如Bill Buxton的《素描用户体验》和Edwin Hutchins的《野外认知》)。许多大学都开设了人机交互的研究生课程。

这个问题的总体答案在于如何教授个人计算机科学。这一切都是基于数学和逻辑，而不是基于用户体验。要做到这一点，你需要的不仅仅是一个普通的4年计算机科学学位(除非你的4年计算机科学学位副修心理学，并强调人机交互)。

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.

左脑对右脑。有些人没有艺术感。

我敢打赌，通过学习和勤奋，任何人都可以在界面设计方面做得更好。这并不意味着你会成为一流的美工或设计师。

我认为改进总是有可能的。