The day Bill Gates called me rude — and other lessons in user experience

As a developer, I totally agree that we're often quick to reduce things down to a bland set of repeatable elements. I think Google's recent re-design (mail, groups, etc.) is just terrible and it feels like some engineer got their way ("Make every button use the same CSS class so we can keep it DRY!").<p>A healthy tension between Design and Engineering seems to be the best - sometimes the best UX isn't the most efficient and engineers need to get pushback on that.<p>Similarly, sometimes the "coolest" UX isn't technically reasonable, and the Designer needs to come back with something else.

&#62; I started to question just how “beautiful” my analogy really was.<p>So did I... so did I.<p>I think it is rude to come out of the corner with such an analogy, it is as if you are trying to say he is stupid and you have to use wordplays to get him to understand.<p>Keep talking business, remember that it is business.

It may be an imperfect analogy, but to call it "rude" seems like a stretch.

There's a bit of a stereotypical representation of "engineers" and "developers" between the lines of this article. I think this may be due to personal experiences from the author and possibly quite on target with the average "engineer/developer" of a few years ago...<p>I also think this is an outdated view by now, and it will become more and more apparent in the years to come: good/successful developers are/will be quite apt at dealing with "the notion of subtle and textured user experience design that balances the emotional and functional aspects of a software experience will always struggle to take root"<p>For the rest of the article: yeah, I feel you!

The laws of physics work differently in the electronic world than in the real world. In the world of computers, you can have a toilet bowl tranform into a shower head on-demand, without "spillage" across functions.<p>Thats what the Finder toolbar is, or the Ribbon, or the smartphone.<p>Seems to me that both Steve Jobs and Gates understood that, but maybe the difference was in their top lieutenants buy-in of the same thing.

I think software development is definitely getting "warm and fuzzier". I've always wanted to build beautiful interfaces (even though I'm not good at designing them). I always side with the designer that wants something nice over the engineer that just wants to do the easy thing.

Sometimes when I have a great big idea, I do this too. But I mainly do think while brainstorming outloud.<p>When I do this to my co-founder, sometimes he'll say "I get it, you don't need to try to sell me on it." In reality, I'm not, I'm just trying to navigate to more common waters--but it's a reflex that's not always helpful.<p>This sounds like what I do sometimes, only to your boss.

What's more interesting to me is how decisions are made<p>No reference to actual A/B tests as to what users actually prefer.<p>Great to know the most widely used software with probably the biggest development budget comes down to the personal preferencs of the boss.<p>So, no different than most other companies :)

I've worked with designers who justify making multiple interfaces for similar functions. Frankly, this approach is almost always wrong and results in confusing interfaces and repetitive, difficult to maintain implementations.<p>Simplifying an experience to it's essence and ensuring that users learn quickly through consistency is key to design.<p>Bad designers are often quick to justify why two similar functions need different interfaces. Good designers understand that combining similar functions eliminates cognitive noise and creates the opportunity to add more features more easily and more understandably.<p>The author of this post strikes me as the bad sort of designer, one who views design as anything other than engineering and who justifies bad design with tortured "emotional" arguments.<p>Users are emotionally happy when they accomplish what they intend, understand and learn quickly, and feel confident they can repeat their result. Users are not happy when you force a single course of action through one-off behavior driven tunnel visioned design, leaving them confused and disoriented afterwards.<p>I've seen this before, and it is the product of egotistical designers caught up in their art instead of their users' experience.<p>Bill was right on this one. Windows interface sucks because it was not designed from the ground up with the user experience in mind by a comprehensive intelligent creator, not because it fails "emotionally" or lacks art.

One little thing I should point out about the UI design is that there is a fine balance &#38; trade off between visual effects and performance. Often times, it is also quite subjective.<p>Take Vista and Windows 7 for example, you see the aero Window edge is roundish (especially top two corners). Now take look at Windows 8, as it is pretty edge, not round at all. Do you know why? It is really because Windows team used at least 5 rectangles, all stacked together to form that roundness for Vista &#38; 7. That means it is more GPU cycle time to draw these duplicated rectangles to give such pretty illusion. With Windows 8, I do welcome the edge/sharp corners, feel more clean and snappy.

&#62; Back in the 1980’s when graphical user interfaces were new and shiny, Bill internalized many of the lessons that made those original GUIs work.<p>Out of curiosity, is this factually correct?

Giving analogies mean 2 things: Either the receiving person is stupid or the one giving the analogy is bad at expressing his ideas.