User Interface Design Time Estimates

(This message also appeared in COMP.LANG.BASIC.VISUAL.DATABASE)

Our group spent the last two years developing a VB3 application that is now in production. We are moving on to a new project, and we are still trying to estimate the time this development will take.

A __LOT__ of the time spent this last round was in interface design. Entire weeks were spent between managers, users, and programmers structuring the screen, selecting colors, placing buttons, deciding whether certian functions would be visible, etc., etc. In retrospect, this design effort was material in the overall programming effort; it may have taken 25% of the program development time.

In conversations I've had with other people writing VB programs, they tell me a similar story. There were lots of cooks in the kitchen and form designs often went through dozens of iterations before the customer was happy with the __APPEARANCE__, to say nothing of program functionality.

Anybody out there have stories to tell... horrible, wonderful, or otherwise?

PS. The customers love the program. It appears our design was a success in the most meaningful sense of the word. Received on Fri Sep 06 1996 - 00:00:00 CEST