A huge part of User Interface Design is on how your software looks. The look is important, it’s not just a nice gimmick it controls what your users feels about your application. A professional graphics design is hard to create and requires a lot of creativity, experience and knowledge.

As most of us indie developers don’t have such a designer at hands, we need to help ourselves. Indeed a simple design that is eye pleasing and carries a message isn’t that hard to create. It just takes some time and research. Wanna know how? I will tell you!

Sounds interesing? Read ahead!

Today I will write about some techniques to declutter a user interface. This is not directly related to a specific kind of media, it applies to user interfaces in general, no matter if you are developing games, websites or bank terminals

Why?

On a clean and simple user interface it is much easier to find the functions you need. Without distractions through unnecessary elements they don’t need to search for the right elements, they catch your eyes.

It is easier for the user to get along with a clean user interface, and much more fun. If you care about your users, you should care about your user interface.

Sounds interesing? Read ahead!

This small article is mainly targeted at hobby game developer. I think that the title menu of your game should receive proper attention, since it is the first screen of your game the user will ever see. And we don’t want our user to start with a strange feeling, don’t we?

In this article I will show you 5 really simple ways to improve your title menu without any design skill at all.

Sounds interesing? Read ahead!

Now, after redefining this blogs directions I want to start with a small article that outlines the essentials of user interface design. Despite the common preconception among developers, user interface design is not about fancy graphics, its about how your software works for the user.

I think the basic concepts are really easy, you just need to take them serious. But let us first think a few minutes about the motive, about why you should spend your rare time on that topic:

Sounds interesing? Read ahead!

Hey folks!

Today I sat down and thought about the target of this blog.  I tried to keep up with professional usability and user experience blogs but there is something missing in my personal history: Experience with large scale user experience optimization with heatmapping, eye tracking, etc.

I am not a usability professional, I am a student and indie developer. So I don’t know why I tried to compete on that level. There are places in software development that I know much better: Opensource and idie game developer communities.

These communities are largely controlled by programmers that never wasted any thoughts about design and user experience. Well I can’t let that happen any further ;-). So I decided to write about design, especially about user experience design, for indie developers.

The most developer I know will respond: "I can’t design,´never could and never will.", but that’s not true at all. There are really simple and logic rules that can greatly improve the users experience  without great design experience.  It’s not always about graphics design!

I hope I will be able to provide you with some useful information and articles!

Regards,

Dennis

Dmitry has written a nice blog post about making wait times feel shorter. He explains why we need progress bars and loading indicators to soften the negative feeling of waiting. I wanted to add some further ideas to reduce the negative feeling.

Keep it interesting

Reading this article I remembered the Sim City 4 loading screen. Instead of telling the user what kind of data is being processed (Why would he care?) it presents some funny messages. Some other games display tips and hints during the loading process.

This can keep the loading process interesting, and I think it can be applied to many other applications than games as well.

As soon as possible

I have recognized another nice way of reducing the wait time in the windows vista start menu search bar. Instead of doing a full search and present all the results at once it displays all the items just as they have been found.

The user can already process these information while the rest is being generated. I think this is a very good way to reduce the negative feeling during loading times: Present some preliminary results to keep the user engaged.

Just a few thoughts i wanted to add to Dmitry’s post.

Do you have any other ideas you may want to add? Please share with me!

Regards,

Dennis