UI设计与其说是科学，不如说是艺术，它需要你对用户的理解和与他们感同身受的能力。

这和整天对着电脑说话是完全不同的。

我认为人们并不总是意识到这一点。

这里有一个小小的自我测试:看看FamFamFam的丝绸图标。考虑一下在您编写的上一个应用程序中选择哪个图标来表示各种功能。如果花超过十分钟的时间来做这件事让你的眼睛开始呆滞，那么UI设计可能不适合你。

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。

我尽量与设计相关的网站和文本保持联系。我发现Robin Williams的著作《the Non-Designer’s Design book》在这些研究中也很有趣。

我相信设计和可用性是软件工程中非常重要的一部分，我们应该更多地学习这方面的知识，不要再为我们不应该做设计找借口了。

每个人都可以偶尔成为设计师，每个人也都可以成为程序员。

阅读苹果人机界面指南。

"其他人做了什么来消除他们的 这方面的不足?” ——克里斯·巴兰斯

与你能找到的最少的电脑储蓄终端用户一起工作。(一个从未见过你的软件的新手)。 从他们那里得到反馈，看看是什么让他们觉得糟糕。 解决这些问题，把它交给另一个不懂电脑的用户， 重复这个过程。

当有足够多的新用户可以使用你的产品时，你就知道你已经完成了你的工作。

(此外，你的软件可能看起来很像微软的，你可能不会喜欢使用它…)

但这不是重点!关键是最终用户可以使用它，并且喜欢使用它!

不是开发者!

同时阅读这篇文章，我发现它在这个领域很有帮助。它基本上是说你应该向用户的需求让步。

换句话说……

你必须看看用户已经在尝试做什么……

人行道和学生

在我上大学的那个校园里，有一条学生们在上下课时留下的小径。当学校注意到这条小道时，他们在人们已经走过的地方竖起了栅栏。学校做错了。你想在学生们已经步行的地方建一条人行道!

视频商店和Netflix

再举一个例子，想想最近的音像店历史:很久以前有很多音像店:Block Buster video等等……人们不喜欢那些音像店的什么地方?当然是滞纳金。所以Netflix出现了，取消了滞纳金，因为它更符合客户/最终用户的需求。

现在，“积木老兄”和其他收费音像店一样，都要破产了。

这个更难做吗?让你的大脑停止运转，给人们他们想要的?当然是……这是让你的意志屈从于他们……这总是比较困难，但最终实现的目标是为最终用户提供他们想要的东西。

我发现UI设计中最好的工具是观察第一次使用该软件的用户。做大量的笔记，问他们一些问题。永远不要指挥他们或试图解释软件是如何工作的。这是UI(以及编写良好的文档)的工作。

我们在所有项目中始终采用这种方法。看到一个用户以一种你以前从未考虑过的方式处理软件总是令人着迷的。

为什么UI设计这么难?一般来说，因为开发者和用户从来不见面。