I found this great video of a talk by UI designer Ryan Singer, by way of Jakub Linowski’s blog. Well worth the time as it compresses a bunch of great strategies into a nice concise presentation … and also made me think “hey, what happened to my Tufte books?”

All really helpful points. However, the stress on language decorating the UI needs some context. For example, I don’t know if the following UI would become more useful with inline, helpful text.

There’s probably an inverse relationship between frequency of use and the amount of helpful text that should be present. Or maybe frequency of use and complexity of task vs. amount of helpful text.

In my experience, those arriving to a UI design from a web application background tend more towards the extra verbage. Those arriving from the desktop world probably tend towards less, since the UI’s they’re building are not page-based and have a much less linear “flow.” The authors of About Face
captured this latter sentiment when they wrote that you shouldn’t focus all of your design efforts on the beginning user (nor on the power-user, for that matter) but rather aim for that somewhat frequent user in the middle.

Doing a lot of work in Flex and AIR means working with UI tools and frameworks that encourage less linear paths. This finds me often dropping a lot of verbage to clean up the interface for the frequent user.

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