Obviousness
User Interface Design, like Psychology, is often accused of being “obvious.” It seems that whenever I point out a particular thing which needs to be fixed, or something which could be improved, or even something which exists which is actually seems like a very clever idea to me, someone will tell me it’s obvious. That’s the fate of most Psychological ideas as well. No matter how many decades it took for Psychologists to figure something out (and how many experiments it took to “prove” it!), when you tell someone about that thing, more often that not that person will claim it to be obvious.
To me, something which rings “obvious” in the world of UI Design is damn good design. We can, however, further extend the Psychologist/UI Designer metaphor. Simply sitting down and talking to a Psychologist even when nothing’s wrong can be such a pleasing, heartwarming, and life-affirming thing to do. It takes the right kind of Psychologist to do this, but I know for a fact that they exist. I wouldn’t be here talking to you about UI Design right now if I hadn’t met a Psychologist who helped convince me to take the road less traveled by—and he wasn’t even trying! The point is that application designers can benefit greatly by talking to a UI Designer, even if they think that nothing’s wrong. The UI Designer will tell the programmers/managers/architects things that they all think are obvious, but in the end it will help anyway.
We can further extend the metaphor by equating Visual Interface Designers with Psychiatrists. A Psychiatrist will typically solve your problem by prescribing drugs, just as a Visual Interface Designer will solve your problems with aesthetics. Both are entirely necessary at times (Visual Interface Designers perhaps moreso), but if you only visit a Psychiatrist and not a Psychologist, you won’t get the full story—just like if you only apply aesthetic fixes to a interface you won’t really have a usable interface.
Either way, the ideas are deemed “obvious” in the end. Of course you were going to make that change I mentioned. Silly me.