There’s a lot of talk going around about Sparkle, Microsoft’s new UI design tool set, but I’ve been scared that this is the end of good user interface design since the second paragraph I read about it:

It’s the rise of the graphic designer!

(from Scoble’s blog)

At which point in time did we start letting graphic designers design user interfaces?  What happened to all the user interface designers?  You know, the ones that think about how to make software intuitive and user friendly, efficient and productive as opposed to flashy and cool looking.

You want to see how this ends, what software is going to wind up looking like in the future with graphic designers in charge? Look at the web.  Particularly, look at all those flash sites (no sparkle is not a flash killer, but flash gives designers the power to misbehave much more than HTML does). Have our standards for user interface design become so bad that all we care about is it looking pretty? Do we not care about productivity for users anymore?

Lets put graphic designers back where they belong - in the marketing department - and develop some tools that bring about the rise of the user interface designer.  We’ll bring the graphic designers in as consultants to engineering to design logos and icons as required, under the direction of the usability engineers.