Designing first impressions

This post from Ed Sims dovetails nicely with what I wrote last night about designing the blank-slate phase for your app. He reminds us that your software only has one chance to make a first impression.

So while you spend time building some great features and making your product more scalable, do not forget to spend time, lots of it, in the areas that customers touch and see.  This means making the install process as easy as possible (this is where appliances can help in many cases) and making your GUI intuitive and easy to use.

So put some thought into how your software appears and behaves straight out of the box.