I am not a graphic designer, but I do like to think that I have some design sense and certainly some sense of what a good user experience is. A good part of this comes from being a user myself.
I have been working on a project recently, mentoring a client who is modifying a website that they purchased from another company. It is a packaged site that is used by many in their particular industry and is licensed with rights to make modifications.
This particular site was the vendor's first venture of taking their old application and bringing it into .NET. But I thik in focusing on .NET, they neglected to think about the UI and the resulting (v1) website looks like a DOS application slapped into a browser window. This is a big problem for my client because it will get incorporated into their own website. The design and usability are very important to them. I was brought in to help them learn what they needed to know to do the programming, but in the last few weeks, the UI issue has come to the fore because everytime we were going through the site, all of us were frustrated with the user experience. We knew we had to attack it head on.
Each screen presents a window centered in the browser window. They even have a grey background that adds to our impression of a DOS application. Ech.
Each page is 100% dedicated to the current function. So in many cases, the page above has nothing on it but data entry fields and the logo. All navigation and actions are controlled by a few rows of text hyperlinks at the bottom of the page. Ecch again. They do not visually organize the various flavors of navigation (continue to another page of this particular data entry form, go to another area of this web site or even non-navigation tasks like send an email or look up definitions of terms). There are a ton of things about this website that say “I am a DOS application, not a web site”. (Flashes of “Hi I'm a Mac.” “And I'm a PC”) So one of the challenges that my client has is to reorganize the site, apply some design, revise the navigation (eg: common functions on a menu that is on every page, multiple-page data entry forms inside of a tabbed control, etc.). All of this they also need to do with minimal impact to the site's funcationality so that they can be prepared to deal with vendor upgrades. Without being design experts, there are some very obvious things that we can do to make this site look like a web application, not just a DOS app in a web browser.
An important thing to remember that in the long run, this is an application first and a website second. A good chunk of the site is geared towards data collection which does mean considering that the user experience should be different than a typical marketing or information-presentation website. With this addtional and important objective in mind, I believe my client is well-armed.
Instinct is going to carry them a long way in modifying the UI of this site. Beyond that, just looking at sites they like and finding resources that are geared towards basic UI concepts for websites. These are all good for a first pass. If they want to go deeper, there are tons of resources. For the big picture, I'm a fan of the Great Minds in Development series on this site. Here you can watch interviews with gurus like Jakob Nielsen (episode 1) and Steve Krug (episode 16) on website usability.