This is a good point you make, Phil. There is a balancing point between management and user priorities. What I have found works is that you get them all in a room together and spec out the UI issues openly. It's important that a developer not get caught in the crossfire between differences in what the users want and what the paying customer (management) wants.

If management insists on features of lack thereof that makes life difficult for a user running the application, the application will not be used. This point should be stressed to management as well. The reverse is true as well: If you make the application UI easy to use but doing so glosses over important business rules or data integrity issues then the application is used but does not produce expected results or other output.

>
> > The "USERS" of a piece of software are not necessarily the ones
> > [footing] the bill for it, so it may not be the case that what the
> > user thinks is the best UI design is what should be programmed...
> > We as developers do have an obligation to make our designs as user-
> > friendly as possible but that obligation is subservient to the
> > obligation to reach the customer’s goals.
>
>Bill: The user is my customer. If the client (the one who pays my fee) wants an app that helps its users do their jobs more effectively, then we'll get along fine. But if they start giving priority to factors other than the user's goals ("We don't have time to put in intelligent error handling; just throw up an error message box and we'll fix it in the next release"), we're going to butt heads. I will try to explain that it's a false economy to "save time" by making software that doesn't serve the users' goals, but if they won't listen to reason (g), I'd rather walk than be complicit in creating bad software. There's plenty of work out there...
>
>
>By the way, anyone who's interested in discussing UI design issues is welcome to visit the design.ui discussion group at DevX.com. Point your newsreader at news://news.devx.com/design.ui, or, if you'd like to experience a user-hostile UI firsthand (g), use our Web interface at http://news.devx.com/cgi-bin/dnewsweb.exe?cmd=xover&group=design.ui.
>
>---
>Phil Weber
>DevX.com, Inc.