I was contacted this week by an old acquaintance, and he had a proposition for me.
"Hey, I hear you're a programmer! That's great, because my buddy and I have
this idea for a business. We have everything important figured out, and all we need is a programmer to throw
Good article, but I'd guess the reality is more like 25-50x as much work as non-technical people assume, and a good interface takes about 5x the work of everything else.
They don't merely underestimate the non-interface work, they greatly underestimate the interface work as well.
As a rough estimation, if you include everything (apperance, discussion, functionality, interaction with other controls, …) I would say that every single input field or button is about a day of work. And then you start to realise how many buttons there is in any GUI and how much it will cost.