Creating a more user friendly interface

When you hear the word UI what pops into your head? Some buttons or some pretty graphics? For me it is about people's preconceptions on how something should work and creating a way to best match that.

A simple example would be a button. Buttons in most people's minds are meant to be pressed, if you designed a image in the shape of a button you should expect it to be pressed. Same thing applies to hyperlinks, see what I did there? I made you believe that some underlined text with a hand cursor is a hyperlink because this is how we have been conditioned to think online.

Today you see many sites going against theses ingrained ideas to standout or be different however this cause pain to the users as they have to relearn how to use your site. When something is different it doesn't mean it's good just like when something is old it doesn't mean it's bad but then I guess the reverse is true also.

Recently I started using a new browser on Mac OS X called Stainless, it is an excellent piece of software with only one minor UI issue that makes it hard for first time users. Tabs in most applications(firefox, safari, IE to name a few) have a lighter colored active tab with shadowed/shaded ones indicating inactive tabs. However, this is reversed in Stainless which means for the first few hours you will be accidentally closing the wrong tabs as you unlearn your old habits. Expectations are always going to be the biggest hurdles to a changed user interface. As they say old habits die hard.