Designing Interfaces with JavaFX

Good design makes you happy. I was happy when I first saw an iPod, and even happier when I first held it in my hand. Sometimes, you will not notice the positive effects good design has on you, but you will always notice the effects of bad design.

I'm a software developer, not a designer. I've known that ever since the late 90's when I repeatedly failed at impressing my friends with my one-minute Flash intro for my two-paged personal website over at Geocities. Why haven't I learnt my lesson and still deal with visual design today? Because I believe a good visual design is essential for any software that has a user interface. If you don't believe me, read what Ben Northrop wrote about the Halo effect.

Designing a great user interface is hard, in particular when you're more excited about your domain models and your test coverage of 101%. Unfortunately, even smart developers can write bad user interfaces, as Karsten Lentsch explains in this Jax session (in German). It takes a lot of time, training, and user research until you come up with a user interface that doesn't suck and that is tailored to your user's needs.

If you're lucky, you have a thorough and well-organised process for that. If you're even luckier, you work with a professional user interface designer who can do all those things for you. That's also a great way to find a scapegoat in the end, by the way.
But even working with a designer doesn't save you from analysing your information architecture and from organising your application content. There's still a lot to do.

And this is what I'm currently doing. My job is to develop a user interface for a client-server business application offering a compelling user experience. Here's what I have so far:

• a visual designer
• the great book Designing Interfaces by Jenifer Tidwell
• a prototype of the client
• four personas
• and lots of ideas

Oh wait! I have some fantastic tools, too. They are centred around JavaFX as we saw the potential of this platform pretty early in our project and it has not disappointed us since. JavaFX supports the design process by its separation into layout (FXML), logic (controller classes), and appearance (CSS) tools. All of these can be tied together nicely with our underlying Eclipse rich client platform thanks to Tom's e(fx)clipse project.
There's nothing like a good tool chain. Well, a good design maybe.

So I know JavaFX allows me to develop great user interfaces, but how do I actually do it? How do I put the pieces together? This is the main question I'm going to ask my designer and myself again and again over the course of the next weeks and months. We have a general layout for our application window, which is fairly common in other applications, I would say, but one of the first things to decide now will be the navigation. How can the user go forward and backward in our application? How does she know where she is? And how do we tell her what else there is?
Exploring these questions is going to be part of my next blog posts. Stay tuned.