Usability

I was just reading a post from Creating Passionate Users comparing good usability to "water flowing downhill". In a nutshell the post is talking about making the right things easy and the wrong things hard -- making the right things natural, like "water flowing downhill". They have quite a few examples, here's one:

Defining what your code should do should be challenging. Figuring out which API methods will give you that capability should be simple.

And the quote I really enjoyed is:

Playing the game should be challenging. The interface should be brainless.

I'm not the best user interface designer, but I also don't think I'm the worst. I haven't always been too fond of creating interfaces, I like working "behind the scenes". Creating a good framework or API and seeing it used successfully is great. I've been doing more framework/API design and implementation lately and have really been enjoying it. I have also been doing a lot more UI work lately and always feel like it isn't quite there yet.

Anyway, I've started (I opened the cover) reading Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug. It's supposed to be really good. Hopefully I can learn some good stuff on UI design from it. Every developer should be good at interface design, be it web, forms, API, framework, ect.