Does my application need a colorful bright interface with amazing icons, animated skins and cool sound effects?
First, think about how much time does an average user spend working with your application per session and what does he use it for. If user spends more than 20-30 minutes per session within your application (which is not a game of course) then he might get tired of all these bells and whistles very quickly. The best GUI is the one you don’t even think about. It must be invisible and just lets get on with your job.
Think why Adobe Photoshop is gray like a dirt. Because, it must not divert designer’s attention while he is working with own image documents. Gray is one of the most invisible colors.
For example, we used this principle in our TBS Cover Editor - 3d box shot maker application.
Our first intention was to make a smashing GUI with the coolest effects ever. However, we stopped on a plain almost monochrome interface in order not to bother users with our coolness but let them fully concentrate on their box shots and cover designs.
Think if your GUI is invisible.
This is a meaningless emotional post about a great achievement of our small development team - Indigo Byte Systems in partnership with True BoxShot Software.
Our application, TBS Cover Editor was selected by Embarcadero ( owner and producer of Delphi and C++ Builder) for their Delphi application showcase: http://embarcadero.com/application-showcase
Without any hesitation our team is very proud of this fact.
It proves that even an application made by a relatively small workshop of several developers can be a high quality product that meets the highest standards.
That’s very inspiring for our team and I hope for all ISV teams!
If you deal with software development technologies, services, or programming tools then you likely have some useful articles on your web site or blog that you want to share with other software developers. General purpose social sites like Digg.com, StubleUpon.com or Reddit.com are good but their audience isn’t well targeted and has pretty low conversion rate.
In addition to those common resources I’d recommend to submit your articles about software development to the specialized sites. Here is a list of my favorite resources mainly devoted to programming for Microsoft Windows platform:
Feel free to submit your interesting and quality content to those resources but double check if your content is not just pure hype or a sales copy. Your submission must be topic relevant and must have real value for readers. For example it may be a how-to article, troubleshooting, use case description, in-depth review, technology report, tutorial, manual, or another useful content.
If your follow this simple rule people will actively vote for your submissions and you may easily receive hundreds of targeted visits to your web site or blog.
If you know more similar social resources devoted to software development then feel free to mention them in the comments. I’ll appreciate your feedback.
