The principles of beautiful web design vs Desktop software design

Question

I'm about to embark on my first attempt at Desktop Software Design and I wanted to know any similarities behind the core principles of Web design that i can take with me or differences or books or articles etc?

Any help greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

As mentioned many times here on SO, "Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug is an invaluable resource when it comes to usability and UI design.

Answer 2

I've been told that one of the most important things to keep in mind in web development is that you cannot rely on the user viewing your application in any particular browser. In particular, different browsers handle different window-sizes and screen resolutions differently.

For example, fixed-width versus variable-width pages are a constant concern in web development because of how different machines and browsers handle them.

Moving on to desktop software design (WinForms?), you will have much more fine-grain power to control the appearance and user-interface of your software.

But remember, young Peter Parker: With great power comes great responsibility!

Answer 3

I'm just going to throw one tip out there for you to keep in mind that I've found different: desktop apps should be responsive. Users on the web are somewhat acclimatized to wait for seconds for their action to take effect (well, not we SO readers, cause we're using the good stuff :-), but you know what I mean). On a desktop application, that wait can seem interminable, and especially unforgiving is if you lock up the main event loop while processing data for several seconds. Even repeated delays on the order of hundreds of milliseconds can make your app feel sluggish. Use threads to keep the UI snappy, and make sure scrolling and loading operations are crisp. Load lazily or incrementally if necessary.