There are a ton of web pages on UX but it really pays to spend some time in different bookstores, where you'll find material that you don't see online. I've read a lot of books on creating "good" user interfaces, which may fly in the face of standards. And conversely to all of this, a lot of material on good design and standards is just pure rubbish. Take in a lot of info and come to your own conclusions.
Consistency is always key as well, whether or not you're following someone else's standards, just follow your own. Put common functionality in consistent places. For example, do your best to put page/form-level buttons in the same place on every page, and then try to be consistent about where you put page-unique buttons. Save/Cancel/Delete should never be so close that the user can confuse them, or too far apart. ;) And use CSS (or similar mechanisms) as much as possible to control images, colors, and text styles. Change the image for Save buttons in one place and the entire application is morphed. Related: I optionally allow the admin or individual users to change the color scheme and lots of other visual aspects for the entire application with a single selection. The "standard" here is where screens are, not what they look like. That said, many of us are familiar with "web parts" (like at iGoogle.com) where users can move around sections of their screens. Part of your "standard" may be recognizing that you can't make everyone happy when you're designing your forms, so at least give people the tools they need to re-arrange page segments to suit their own style. This actually makes coding a lot easier because you can focus on functionality rather than fine-tuning the placement of components. Use the right controls for things like grids, dropdown lists, radio buttons, and checkboxes. Each has their place. For example: Yes/No should not be two separate checkboxes and should not be in a dropdown list. Also (for VARs), be prepared to change controls depending on where you deploy your software. This isn't easy and might be too much work for most VARs. When you create software for many companies you may not know how many records they have have in their tables. You might design a table to have a dropdown list for one client because they only have, say, 10 regions. But that's not appropriate when you sell to a company where every county (thousands) is a different region. That brings me to my last point: Try to create stand-alone controls which perform specific duties: The customer selector, the invoice display, the printer selector, etc. Not only does this create consistency (on-topic with Standards) but it allows you to maintain such code in one place for the entire application. The first time you realize that you need to change the same screen in two places, you will recognize the benefit of using controls. This falls into the category of object-oriented development, code-reuse, refactoring, etc. HTH Tony Gravagno Nebula Research and Development TG@ remove.pleaseNebula-RnD.com Nebula R&D sells mv.NET and other Pick/MultiValue products worldwide, and provides related development services remove.pleaseNebula-RnD.com/blog (latest blogs on Web Services) Visit PickWiki.com! Contribute! http://Twitter.com/TonyGravagno _______________________________________________ U2-Users mailing list U2-Users@listserver.u2ug.org http://listserver.u2ug.org/mailman/listinfo/u2-users
