Women's magazines and million-selling software

Ben Galbraith from Palm gave an interesting presentation about creating a compelling UI for one's software. Watching the presentation, I couldn't help thinking that software development has come of age. Even about three years ago, it is hard to imagine an engineer coming onstage at a software conference, displaying a slide with glossy women's magazines on it, and saying: "We as developers have to follow the fashion in the industry".

So what is "fashion in software" as of November 2009? Consider an example: the application "Delicious Library" has probably the most basic functionality of its class of applications (online itinerary tracking). Based on the technical features alone, it is not clear why it should be favored instead of its competitors with a much more more impressive feature set. But here's the catch: "Delicious Library" is a real designer's work. It is a "beautiful thing" designed with an eye for detail and a signature aesthetic style. The result - 500.000 USD in sales in three months, with very little advertising.

Traditional software has come of age because now we speak increasingly more about the packaging of the software we build, about the wrapping. It turns out that wrapping is related to the inner cogs and wheels of an application. Knowing how an application would look and feel, what kind of behavior it would display if it were a physical object is a fundamentally different development strategy than having a bunch of code and building an UI to make the code behave. And according to Ryan Singer of 37 Signals, the UI itself is nothing but another software layer - the outermost, thin layer of software with hooks to the lower levels.

For those teams that are still not convinced about the need to budget for UI development and design, some facts:

• It is 2-3 times more expensive to push software inside a badly designed UI to the market than doing it right from the start;
• When contemplating a beautifully designed car, you are activating the same part of the brain that you are using when recognizing faces; the "face" of something familiar is its design;
• For an average person, it takes about one tenth of a second to gauge the quality of a company based on the impression of the company's web site.

"Attractive things work better", as Donald A. Norman says. Attractive software sells better, Ben might add. I'm convinced. After all, I am a Mac user!