Do you know your users? Are your users engaged in the development of their business application? Do they enjoy working with your application? Developing a complex information system is a challenge for any development team. System architects and developers often prefer to concentrate on technology, data model and business logic, in the process neglecting the user interface. They forget that user interface is the only part of your information system that users see, and often the most important metric of usability and quality. High-quality user interface is not just a matter ofengineering, but also of social skills and life and business experience of developers. Make your customers happy!

1. Is There a "User" in
Your User Interface
Ladislav Mačkala
IT director, Podsjetnik d.o.o

2. About me
18+ years of experience in Java
development and relational database design
and implementation
Holding B.Sc. And M.Sc. in Computing
Have lead Java development teams in
several software companies in Croatia
Currently leading IT and Marketing
department in medical tourism company

3. What is this presentation about?
About my experience in GUI development
About importance of listening to your users
when developing GUI
About user-developer impedance mismatch

4. Motive
A real-life example
Application 1: CRM
developed in-house, custom-tailored, 1 year in
production, cca 50 users
Application 2: ERP
made by a domestic software company, off-the-shelf
product, 3 months in production, cca 10 users
Some users use both applications – their user
experience with each of them is drastically different!

5. Motive (part II)
A friend of mine, a developer, showed me
his DSL framework and generated server-
side code.
When I asked about the GUI, he answered:
„Oh, that's easy.”
Is it?

6. User – developer impedance
mismatch
End users and developers have different
perception of the same application
End users use it every day, in the predictive
way, and want the application to MAKE
THEIR LIFE EASIER!
Developers want to make cool things, but in
the end don't use these applications!

8. Goals
To find what makes end users ("them")
happy
To find what makes developers ("us") happy
To find ways to reduce user-developer
impedance mismatch

9. The developers' side
Developers love to create new, cool and
interesting stuff
Developers hate to do boring and repetitive
things (like maintaining their own code)
Developers are focused on technology
Developers are in love with their models

10. The developers' side (part II)
Developers think that the GUI they produce
is much less important then their code and
data models
Developers think they are smarter than their
users (danger!)
Developers rarely want or can see their
application through users' eyes – they rarely
think of USER EXPERIENCE

11. The users' side
Users use the application to do their job, and
that which makes it easier
Users want to be faster using your
application, not slower
Users don't want to adjust to the application,
but want the application to be adjusted to
them
Users want the application to look good,
because they look at it most of the time

12. The users' side (part II)
Users want consistency while they work
with the application – which means: they
want to learn only once
Users want the application to be fast -
which means: they don’t want to wait for
the application
Users like colors, images, fonts, charts...
Users are INERT, they don't like
changes

13. Real-life stories
Experiences of my team and my users
Both good and not so good

14. Story 1: make your GUI logical
Users want to be forced to use as little
clicks/steps as possible
Users want to learn things once and then to
repeat them
Consequence: my old users teach new
users how to use the application during
business rules education – without IT
support!

15. Story 2: accelerate time-consuming
tasks
Creating offers for our patients
Frequent operation
Time-consuming: lots of manual tasks,
lots of clicks
Similar offers must be created from
scratch

17. Story 2: accelerate time-consuming
tasks (part II)
Solution: implemented creating offers through
"shortcuts", "shortcut" templates and copying
offers
Result: time per offer reduced 5-10 times (15
min. to 2-3 min. per offer), for group of offers
even more
Users actively participated in development
and were delighted with that feature

19. Story 3: missing colors in the
pallette
We upgraded our infrastructure (SmartGWT
3.0 -> 4.1)
The ColorPicker in the RichText editor
doesn't have the same colors in the pallete
And our users love the specific hue of pink
that is now gone!
Solution: not resolved yet – the possibility of
riots not negligible!

20. Before (v. 3.0)
After (v. 4.1)

21. Story 4: making application faster
We accelerated some frequently used parts of the
application by adding missing indices in the database
We accelerated the frequently used reservation calendar
with heavy refactoring and framework upgrade
We removed some premature optimizations that reflected
general application performance
Consequence: nobody noticed!
When we asked them if they noticed, they admitted that it
seemed a little bit faster, but they “weren’t sure"

22. Story 5: making application slower
We mistakenly deployed a new version with
suboptimal SQL query in the frequently used part
of the application
We upgraded our infrastructure due to serious bug
that could cause data corruption and some parts of
application got a little bit slower.
Consequence: our support lines got hot-red!
They notice the slightest change in speed, if that
change in speed means slower!

23. Story 6: who wanted it?
One user wanted something trivial like italic font and red color to
emphasize something – it was done in minutes and everyone was
delighted!
We made small auxiliary tool for our cashiers when they have to
calculate percentages - it was done in an hour and they loved it!
We have worked for days on a complex feature that wasn't requested
by users but was crucial to implement from business perspective –
some users noticed and nobody was impressed!
Conclusion: it's not about how hard it is to implement something or how
much time it took – it's about who wanted it in the first place and if it
makes their life easier!

24. Story 7: protecting user from
themselves
Users want to be informed when they are trying to
do something wrong
Users want to be warned if their actions may result
with some unpredicted situation
Users don't want to be able to do things in several
various ways, they want just one way
Conclusion: it's better to unnecessary warn your
users, than not to warn them at all!

26. Story 8: using colors and images
We made main application screens full of colors,
images and various fonts.
Our users are accustomed to the layout of those
views and can spot the vital information without
much reading, just scanning.
Conclusion: make your application easy to scan!

29. Conclusion
Include your users in all phases of your
development process!
Listen to them!
Don't assume what they want – ask them!
Make them happy and they will be grateful
and loyal! (maybe even do your job )

30. Q & A