“Interfaces are the outer skin”, we tend to believe.

The usual scenario on a typical Web application development process is to have the team of tech gurus and programmers kick off the project. They will draw up database structure, flow diagrams and determine all the specs for the servers, OS, bandwidth load and so on. A few months later, after long nights of red eyes, unmet deadlines and overblown budget, someone from the marketing department (or a programmer with a sudden attack of feng shui) will say: “Hey! This doesn’t look very nice. Let’s get a designer pimp up those interfaces!”

Well, the designer can tweak, pimp and put flashing red flames all over or create an avant-garde minimalist white-on-white masterpiece out of that app. Whatever the case, you could have better saved the money. Having a designer put a mask over the product on this last stage won’t make a difference.

This is the outer skin approach.

An interface is the limit of two worlds. The zeroes and ones on one side and a user that needs to get something done on the other. Buy a book, complete a bank wire safely or browse through a list of artists to download the latest hit. They don’t care about ones and zeroes. If a monkey did the job they’d get one.

We tend to believe that the inner core of these applications is the system, the programming and the IT fanfare. The design is there just to make it nice and marketable. This approach makes us go left to right in the graphic above (from system to user).

Wrong. The inner core is the user and the activity she or he wants to complete. We should go right to left: from user to system. And in this approach interfaces (thus, design) comes first. Whatever technology we use needs to respond to the user and to the interface she or he is interacting with.

Many will doubt in first hiring a design team and later on integrating a development team. They may feel this is an IT project… but it is not. The IT project is making those interfaces do what they are supposed to do without the user knowing. But the big picture implies helping the user with a certain activity… and getting out of the way. Plus, defining all interfaces in the first place makes the programmer’s life much easier. He will just need to fill up this drop list with some data or generate an email with the information filled in on certain form. Programmers will work over more solid grounds. It makes business sense.

Interfaces are closest to the user. Interface design should be the inner core.