User Interface for Not Yet Techies

"Computer Careers: Designing the Look and Feel of Operating Systems and Software Programs"

by Richard Stooker, President Info Ring Press and author of Secrets of Changing to a Computer Career

User interface is the overall design of an operating system or software program. It's not something you think about or notice under normal circumstances, unless something seems "odd." Then you wonder what's going on. The user interface governs the "look and feel" of what the computer screen is showing us. It may be changed and modified to suit our preferences, but on the whole, Windows looks like itself and Mac OS X looks like itself and we immediately can detect which is which.

Years ago the user interface was not as standardized

When you used DOS, UNIX or other command line interface, what you saw was very basic. It started to become an issue with the advent of GUI / Graphics User Interface operating systems such as Apple and, later, Windows. Software programmers began using standard APIs to create programs for these operating systems and users began expecting all such programs to look and work basically the same, as much as possible.

Actually, many software developers ignored the standard looks, but their programs looked amateurish simply because different -- and why did they try to reinvent the wheel? The Java Swing package contains a number of different user interface L & F / look and feels - the Java developer can pick and choose, depending on their needs.

They can choose Metal, a cross-platform L&F, Apple Mac OS X, Motif and Windows for their program's user interface.

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