“We’re no longer going to peacefully accept products that mess up our lives and put everything we work on at risk,” they are saying. They’re also saying “That’s just the way it is” is no longer tolerable as an answer to a problem. Examples of good design, when they have occurred, have been presented as vivid proof that good design is possible.

Developers listened. Greatly improved technology in the late twentieth century eliminated a host of barriers to good interface design and unleashed a variety of new display and interaction techniques wrapped into a package called the graphical user interface or, as it is commonly called, GUI (pronounced “gooey”). Almost every graphical platform now provides a style guide to assist in product design. Software to aid the GUI design process proliferates. Hard on the heels of GUIs has come the amazingly fast intrusion of the World Wide Web into the everyday lives of people. Web site design has greatly expanded the range of users and introduced additional interface techniques such as multimedia. (To be fair, in some aspects it has dragged interface design backward as well, but more about that later.)

It is said that the amount of programming code devoted to the user interface now exceeds 50 percent. Looking back, great strides in interface design have occurred. Looking at the present, however, too many instances of poor design still abound. Looking ahead, it seems that much still remains to be done.


Atin Dasgupta is founder of web design company Mumbai Leveljam (www.leveljam.com). We deliver strategic digital business solutions for business small and big alike. Each project that we take on starts with careful listening and understanding of your requirements. We ask, we analyze, we discover the right solution for your company’s needs. This is followed by strategy and planning. We take a planned approach to executing every project as we believe each client and project is unique.


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