A woman from Visa Fraud Protection Services just called me. She wanted to make sure I was, in fact, the person who made several charges on my card last night. Wow - that's scary.

First, she asked me a series of questions to verify I was the cardholder. She started each questions with something like, "I have ___ as the first three digits of you social security number. Please verify the middle two numbers." She didn't ask for the last four. She asked similar style questions about my address and birthdate ("I have October listed for your birthday. Please verify the date."). This showed me the caller wasn't some stranger trying to pry information out of me. She had the info; I was just verifying small parts of it. I felt safe.

Then she asked if I was the person that made a purchase at each of the three places my card was used at last night. Yup - it was me. (What a relief!)

Last night, I used my card at a gas pump to start filling up my tank, and then I went inside the convenience store and bought quite a few other items. Well, apparently the gas station runs a $1 verification charge at the gas pump to verify the card is legit, then charges the actual amount of the gas when you're done and clears the $1 charge. So to Visa, it appeared that someone could have used it at the pump for a small charge to see if it would work, then went inside and spent a bunch of money. Something about the series of charges triggered a notification inside Visa, and they picked up the phone and called to make sure it was me doing the charging.

I thanked her profusely.

I am so impresssed with Visa right now. That was a fantastic experience.

I have a friend, with whom I've worked on several projects recently. He's an excellent developer - he knows quite a lot about several languages and can work fluidly in any one of them - but when I start talking about user experience, he has this bad habit of saying "I don't want to spend too much time on it".

I know many of you have heard a statment like this before. And I know many more of you have been the ones to say it. So I wanted to take a few minutes to address this rather bad habit.

A statement like this one means something has gone wrong in the development process. It means that instead of focusing on the user, which is the only person that matters, you've resolved to believe that your application will automatically be good enough for anyone to use. After all, you built it, and you know what you're doing. So you start working and along the way, you start making little decisions that make sense at the time, but result in a questionable experience. In my friend's case, he recently finished up a web application designed to allow clients to report issues found within other projects being built for them. On the login screen of the application is a simple form consisting of Username and Password fields, and a Login button. But there's also a blue text link up in the top-right corner of the main content area of the page that says "Login".

Upon using the application for the first time, I think to myself, "What's that do?" The blue text link is the first thing I click on the page. It does nothing. I enter my username and password, and click it again. It does nothing. I click the Login button that looks like it's actually part of the login form, and I am logged in. I glance over to the little blue text link again, and notice it now says "Logout". Oh, I get it. It's a status indicator, and it toggles depending on your login status. I get that.

So why is it a link when you're on the login screen? And if it's not going to be a link, why put it there at all? The only time it says "Login" is when you're on the login screen. The login screen already has a Login button. "You should get rid of that blue text link link", I say. "It's confusing."

"It's a toggle", he says. "I know, " I say back. And then the conversation turns and we never get back to it.

Five minutes later, I watch someone else try to login for the first time. He does the same thing I did.

So let me get this straight. You don't want to spend a lot of time on user experience, so you're going to make your users spend their time figuring out how to use your application? Yeah, that seems like a bad plan.

The interface is the product. It's the part users use. It's what turns people into "users". Without users, your application is ... well ... useless. Users don'ts care how you built the tool, how long it took, how hard it is to maintain, or anything related to you job. They don't know you and they don't care about you. All they want to know is that when they use one of your tools, it will do what it's supposed to, as painlessly and easily as possible.

Now you've gone and made them think. And that's just sad. You went out of your way to add that link to the login screen, thereby creating the one thing on the login screen that is confusing. So your product's first impression is now confusing. Is that what you want?

The interface is the product.

Remember that. Chant it to yourself at night. Sing it to yourself on the way to work in the morning. Say it out loud to everyone that plays a part in application development in your company.

Instead of saying "I don't want to spend a lot of time on it", realize that "it" is the only part that matters, and that "it" is the implementation of the initial idea. Instead of saying "We need to get it done quickly, so let's build it now and clean it up later", build functioning mockups first (in this case, HTML pages) so everyone has something to "touch" while you're building out the logic. Adjust your code based on their feedback. You'll get done at the same time, if not faster, and you'll have a better application as a result.