Creating GUIs that Meet User Needs

A GUI has to be so many things. From a developer perspective, the GUI has to communicate user requests to the processing components of an application in an orderly manner. A user needs a GUI that's easy to understand and works with the user, rather than making work cumbersome. Support personnel want a GUI that's bulletproof, or at least as difficult as possible to use incorrectly. Managers want a GUI with a short learning curve. In fact, everyone wants something from the GUI.

Often, developers just barely meet their needs and a few of the user requirements. It's not that developers lack communication skills or that they're unconcerned about the user, but they do lack tools that really help them pin down everyone's needs. That's why a product such as Lucid Spec is so important. The more complex your environment, the greater the number of people you must support, the more you need a product such as Lucid Spec.

Unfortunately, this product has a substantial number of holes. None of the tutorials are particularly revealing; the help file is poorly designed; and the software lacks flexibility in many cases. Even so, it's better than nothing when you have a complex application to design and a lot of users with differing ideas on how that application should look.

If you can place an emphasis on the need to communicate, then Lucid Spec probably has something significant to offer everyone involved with the application. Otherwise, given the relatively high price of this product, you might be better off using a product like Visio for your prototyping or creating a prototype in the language product IDE.