The best way hands down is to do usability testing. No eye-tracking, one-way-mirror lab required. Just sit down with some outsiders and give them some tasks to perform on your UI. Even for experienced and talented UI designers, this is invaluable because it cuts right through all the learned knowledge you have of the interface, which is impossible to do for anyone who was involved in creating it.

Of course this advice doesn't apply to power user UIs, but those are easy because your users will constantly email you with improvements.

Agreed. If everybody in your immediate proximity is already intimately familiar with your site, http://www.usertesting.com is great for this. (I'm not affiliated with them other than being a happy customer.)

i have to second this...we learned so much more with just one sit-down with an "average" user than we could have sending them out to friends and asking for feedback.

I do hope that's not an up-and-coming web color scheme or site layout, as that web site dances the edge of Angry Fruit Salad.

And the banner logo has been prepared by somone who either needs glasses or doesn't understand how to use the export for web tool in photoshop.

What an Irony.

"Don't make me think" by Steve Krug is a must-read if you're new to ui design.

I second that

Am I the only one who gets intimidated by good UI design? I think I should just focus on back end stuff and completely outsource anything on the front end.

I mental block sometimes on UI design. OK, got a great idea, I can see how to implement the code, but the UI...

Try to think of it as creating a rough draft I guess, I always think along the lines of I can get a designer to clean it all up later if need be.

The easiest way to get better is to keep asking the following question, over an over again:

"What can I remove from this interface to simplify it?"

Anyone else using Windows 7 and have trouble reading the post because of the font? Here's what the site looks like on my machine: http://awesomescreenshot.com/099470k29

Could just be me though, since I have all of those fonts installed (I think).

Irony yet again, the problem is with the font-stack. I guess you have a version of Helvetica that's not that readable. Only of they followed their own advice and tested it.Though this articles is nothing great and sorta ironic on this site but if you still want to read it - use Readability: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

This is how it looks: http://img98.imageshack.us/img98/8523/201012030938.png

Ironic coming from a site with way too much unreadable helvetica nueue

What do you mean by unreadable? Compared to what? (Serious question. I am tone-deaf on this kind of thing. The font read easily enough to me.)

Okay. Well there's a few things. First, there's a debate over whether serif fonts are more readable than sans-serif, but I think that's all subjective.

Assuming you think helvetica is a good font for website content (a lot of people don't think it is), helvetica nueue (one of its more-expensive variants) was made as a font for featured content (titles, logos, etc) and was never meant to be readable at small sizes.

Besides just looking strange, the eye can't read it as fast.

Use this on the article and then see.http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

Definitely more readable with readability, but that seems to be mostly a matter of font size. If I reduce the font size of the output from readability with C-- in firefox, I don't see a big difference in readability.

IF you reduce. Not by default.And yes font-size is part of design and UI so that's the difference we are pointing out.