Design And User Interface, Comes First
Warning! This post is partly a rant.
If you are in the consumer software development business, get this into your head. Look and feel, design, user interface, creative design, comes first above all else. You might provide the best solution technically, fully comply with the requirements (and then some!), provide better value in-terms of hardware and support, whatever, if your user interface sucks, you have lost half the battle. The reverse is true - wow your clients with a spanking modern design (think apple-like elegance or web 2.0-ish look) and you've almost won.
Now think hard about that. I know techies will cringe at this (hey, what about performance, maintainability, being open-source, NOT RUNNING ON WINDOWS, etc) but this is a hard truth. Even massive enterprise applications needs some sort of UI, assuming there are human users around. You can pitch all you want about high-availability, performance, how you'll throw in extra hours or personnel for support, how you'll give massive discounts. They'll still go drown the drain if your UI sucks.
Need more facts?
- Look at iPods
- Look at iPhones (or the new Android, or in the olden days, Palm OS)
- Look at Mac OSX (or the newer Linuxs or Vista)
- Look at the latest computer games (OK, so maybe Wii games sorta spanks all the fancy looking games, but fancy looking games still sell better than ugly looking ones, all being equal)
I recently learned this the hard way (lost a bloody project due to design).