I’m not a designer and I’ve never claimed to be one, but that’s not an excuse for sacrificing an attempt at creating good user experiences, right?
To be clear, I am not equating user interfaces and user experiences – that’s incorrect. They aren’t the same (though they’re often treated as such). Generally speaking, user interfaces make or break the user experience.
The thing is, developer’s are notorious for creating terrible interfaces.
I’d even go as far as to say as that we have a reputation of creating a horrible user interface then calling the user stupid when they can’t figure out how to use what we created.
Lame.
A Stereotypical UI By a Developer
Personally, I try to do what I can to make sure that I don’t create interfaces like what you see above.
I’m not great at it, but I am attempting to get better and I try to make each project an improvement over the last, and I try to make sure that as I go back and revisit, refactor, and improve existing projects, that I incrementally improve parts of it that I can.
That said, there are a few things that I try to keep in mind whenever I’m working on a new project. The majority of the work that I do is with WordPress, so this will be clearly geared towards that, but I’ve tried to generalize these points so that they are applicable to a variety of platforms.
