Software Interface Design

John Mao, one of our product managers and a good friend, has been doing some research on GUI frameworks for creating Web applications. He’s a big proponent, and while acknowledging some of the risks (e.g. being dependent on external code), he makes a good argument for not “reinventing the wheel”. Recently he sent me a list of some that he has researched including the following:

.NET
ComponentArt: http://www.componentart.com
Infragistics: http://www.infragistics.com
Telerik: http://www.telerik.com

Javascript/AJAX
Google Web Toolkit: http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/
Yahoo! User Interface Library: http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/
ComponentArt: http://www.componentart.com
Ext JS: http://extjs.com (a bolt on: http://www.codeplex.com/ExtJsExtenderControl, Write ExtJS code in C#: http://code.google.com/p/extsharp/)
jQuery: http://jquery.com (general animation framework, there are bolt on’s too)
dojo: http://dojotoolkit.org (bolt on’s: http://dojotoolkit.org/projects/dijit, and http://dojotoolkit.org/projects/dojox)
script.aculo.us: http://www.script.aculo.us which is built on top of Prototyp http://www.prototypejs.org)

I would be interested to know if anyone has any specific experience with any of these frameworks and what opinions are about them (and of course if there are others to consider). After taking a look at them, I’m personally leaning towards experimenting with GWT and YUI.

I am often asked what tools I prefer to use in designing user interfaces. I do believe that there isn’t a “best” tool. True, some tools are better at some tasks than others, but it really comes down to what tool works best for you. I’ve seen designers produce excellent interaction designs with Microsoft Powerpoint. If you are fast and comfortable with a tool, use it. And if you want a better tool, you have to weigh the cost of learning something new against the benefits. Personally, I’m an early-adopter, gadget-freak, bleeding-edge, over-70-feeds in my news reader type, so I love to experiment with new tools to study their interaction patterns as well as discover what new capabilities I might pick up.

My current list of design tools:

Concept exploration: CmapTools, MindManager, Pen & Paper

Interaction design: Pen & Paper, Microsoft Visio, Adobe Dreamweaver, Adobe Flex/AIR

Prototyping: Adobe Flex/AIR, Adobe Flash, Adobe Dreamweaver

Visual design: Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign, Color Schemer