Icebergs and Screen Design

Doing the “creative break” routine after spending hours of debugging a complex interaction between all kind of different servers and wondering why things didn’t work (because nobody had allowed the standard user to actually do anything in the system) - I stumbled upon The Iceberg Secret, Revealed by Joel which talks about why the impression of a product is better than the product itself - at least when you work on it and have to demo it to your clients.

This reflects my experience exactly when I spent a couple of hours styling my program before a meeting with the client. It did exactly the same thing as it did before, but after the design session it looked like a piece of the customers intranet.

Lesson: Always make your stuff look beautyful first.