A Great UI is Invisible | Codrops
A really well designed user interface is one that goes unnoticed by the user, whereas a poorly designed user interface forces the user to pay attention to it instead of the content. Users come to websites in order to achieve a goal: buy a new book, learn about jQuery, share an article with friends, find new music, write a novel or just find the nearest Target. Users don’t come to play with your interface design. In fact, users don’t care about your interface. For years the desktop paradigm and the lack of interactive tools have made people think about user interfaces, how they work and what makes some designs better or worse; but do we really want our users caring about all this stuff?
Users have become too familiar with user interface patterns and user interface components — a user really doesn’t even want to know or even care to know what these things are. Over the years web designers have spent hundreds if not thousands of hours playing with button colors, drop shadows, borders and gradients in order to make the UI more usable and pretty. But really, the end goal of a great user interface design should not be usable, but invisible.
If you haven’t heard, mobile devices are kind of a big deal these days. The multi-touch device has cracked open the idea that user interfaces are a series of clicks and sequences that allow manipulation of content — mobile devices allow more natural user interaction between the human and the content embedded on the device. These Natural User Interfaces (NUI) are more “natural” for a variety of reasons, but, direct manipulation of content and the lack of antiquated metaphors (the desktop) allow these devices to be super easy to use because their interfaces are almost invisible.
But we still work on desktop and laptop computers, we still view web sites and use web applications that can’t always take advantage of this new, more natural interface design with all the wonderful multi-touchy stuff that makes these devices so much fun to use. So, because we aren’t quite there yet, do we continue to create old, “get in the way” interface components? We shouldn’t. The goal of an invisible interface should be the goal of every UI designer and developer.