UX-UI development
Good user interfaces (UI) lessen training time, improve productivity, and reduce error rates. Well-conceived UI and user experience (UX) can give voice to a brand and support — even inspire — a marketing strategy.
How we can help
We design UX and UI for electronic devices. We collaborate with project managers and with hardware and firmware engineers… from prototype to production.
For software, we prefer to design in collaboration with code developers. That can include the UX or just graphical assets, as needed.
Design is for Engineers, too.
“So, how would I…
…oh, it’s right here.”—SatCom engineer
“It is a very nice, clean user interface, and very intuitively easy to use. Anybody who works in an earth station … [can] get it to do something useful without a user manual. That was one of our design goals.
“…Marlin Ouverson did the entire design for the user experience… down to the placement of every pixel and every color… and it’s absolutely beautiful. And everyone that we had come in to view this while we were setting it up was oohing and aahing about it, so we knew we had gotten it right.”
—Leon Wagner, November 21, 2015
Forth Day, Stanford University
Misconceptions
“Our audience doesn’t care about that.”
Good UI & UX benefit everyone.
“Simplicity should be simple to achieve…”
…often implying inexpensive to create. In practice, the clarity, intuitiveness, and approachability we endorse can be challenging to achieve.
UI vs. UX
A succinct way to think of them:
- UI — the visual appearance and arrangement of the controls and content.
- UX — the micro-impressions, flow, clarity, intuitiveness, ease, and the subjective and objective rewards of interactions with websites or applications.
Grounded in history
Circa 1980, Marlin Ouverson was invited to Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) labs, where engineers demonstrated the world’s first mouse, and the first known example of multiple windows on a display with a different application running in each. As a bonus, the monitor could be manually rotated 90° for both horizontal and portrait screen layouts.
Those items the PARC engineers’ workbench paved the way to the first Macintosh and other graphical operating systems. Since those days, Marlin has consistently pressed for improved human-machine interfaces.