Re: GUI primer, do's and don'ts

Mike Shkolnik wrote:
Microsoft has horrible UI design 

Brian, personally I prefer to develop the software that will look like any
another "standard" software for current OS.

And when some started application will look like not "standard", I
personally will say that this software is not good.

For example, I don't like skins or theming (a-la Windows XP) on old OS in
business software, I don't like non-standard controls, non standard
shorcuts, non standard menu captions, non standard glyphs on "standard"
toolbars, non standard buttons/widths etc

And as I understand the original question, Tor asked the link for such guide
with basic topics (that I posted in answer).

PS: for example, by default the Delphi IDE uses the MS San Serif font for
form - but this font is not "standard" and  Microsoft suggests to use the MS
Shell Dlg (and MS Shell Dlg 2 on NT based OS). There are another "bugs" and
as reason the application created by Delphi looks no good (in many minor
details), so any experienced developer can say if app was developed in
Delphi (just after start of exe-file)...


Didn't mean to say your answer was wrong or even that the
MS standards are actually bad. Standards for UI are a good
thing and improve the user experience. I was just venting
about one aspect of a lot of MS software that I happened
to be fighting with currently.

In fact I so despise those darn modal dialogs in my own
apps I have done a lot of work to remove them. An example
is data validation. I outline a data entry control in
red if it has bad data and make the status equal
to the reason why. When the user tries to do the overall
action some more might be turned red and the status
bar shows a message for the reason. Then the focus
is set to the first control with bad data. Absolutely
no pop ups requiring extra user actions to first dismiss
them and then look for and select the controls with
the problem data. I also use light red for showing where
data seems odd but will be accepted so the user should
double check it.

So for example there is a entry field for email address
and the user enters "bob!borland.com", the control
would be outlined in red and the status changed to
"Email address doesn't have the format name@xxxxxxxxxx"
the user changes it to "bob@xxxxxxxxxxx" and the control
ends up outlined in light red with the status
"berland.com doesn't appear to be a registered domain
name. It may be misspelled." but in this case the user
can save the data.

Brian Evans
.

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