Making the Work Easy for the User
The user interface part of a program is one of the most important aspects of any successful and widely popular system. As a programmer I frequently find myself overlooking the user interface part of my projects. Personally, I think it’s because I am lazy and don’t feel like it’s worth my time to play around with a bunch of different stylings and formats that don’t affect the performance and capabilities of the program. If I give myself enough time, then maybe I’ll work on making sure that anything I add looks similar to what already exists in the project. That’s about as far as I’d used to go.
But now I am beginning to realize how important good styling and positioning of elements are to the finished product. In addition to these important aspects is making sure user input is much more simple for the user to handle than it is for the program to handle. For example in Disco Tray Studios’ interactive website My Life in Months, the user needed to think back in time and calculate the number of months that a certain event or experience had lasted them. This isn’t too big of a deal for most people, especially when everyone has a calculator and calendar right at their fingertips! But our team thought a way to make this process quicker for the user. What if we had the user select the dates of their events and experiences instead of counting up a bunch of months? For most people this should be a much faster experience.
Now our team has come to the dilemma of implementing this date picker to replace or work in tandem with the number of months field. This requires much more of an effort than simply sticking to the number of months field. So now we have to ask ourselves if this little feature is worth all of the trouble that we put into it. I like to think that it will be worth the effort. We will see how this new feature will work out, and hopefully it increases user satisfaction and takes My Life in Months to new places.