Chapter 19: Designing Look and Feel

The commonly accepted wisdom of the post-Macintosh era is that graphical user interfaces, or GUIs, are better than character-based user interfaces. However, although there are certainly GUI programs that dazzle us with their ease of use and their look and feel, most GUI programs still irritate and annoy us in spite of their graphical nature. It's easy enough, so it seems, to create a program with a graphical user interface that has a difficulty-of-use on par with a command-line Unix application. Why is this the case?

To find an answer to this question, we need to better understand the role of visual design in the creation of user interfaces.

Visual Art versus Visual Design

Practitioners of visual art and practitioners of visual design share a visual medium. Each must be skilled and knowledgeable about that medium, but there the similarity ends. The goal of the artist is to produce an observable artifact that provokes an aesthetic response. Art is thus a means of self-expression on topics of emotional or intellectual concern to the artist, and sometimes, to society at large. Few constraints are imposed on the artist; and the more singular and unique the product of the artist's exertions, the more highly it is valued.

Designers, on the other hand, create artifacts that meet the goals of people other than themselves. Whereas the concern of contemporary artists is primarily expression of ideas or emotions, visual designers, as Kevin Mullet and Darrell Sano note in their excellent book Designing Visual Interfaces (1995), "are concerned with finding the representation best suited to the communication of some specific information." Visual interface designers, moreover, are concerned with finding the representation best suited to communicating the behavior of the software that they are designing.