The Iceberg Secret, Revealed
You know how an iceberg is 90% underwater? Well, most software is like that too — there’s a pretty user interface that takes about 10% of the work, and then 90% of the programming work is under the covers. And if you take into account the fact that about half of your time is spent fixing bugs, the UI only takes 5% of the work. And if you limit yourself to the visual part of the UI, the pixels, what you would see in PowerPoint, now we’re talking less than 1%.
That’s not the secret. The secret is that People Who Aren’t Programmers Do Not Understand This.
Is the same true for websites? Right now, I don’t think so. 5 years from now, much more so. 10 years from now, when the Web is an application environment and we know much much more about developing UI’s, definitely.
- 14 Feb 02
- interface, joel spolsky
