Hi, I am developing a ERP software inhouse and one of the requests is to have the the username of the person creating any document to appear on the window title when that document is opened.
It will be something like [USR] - Transport Order 123456
Are there any usability rules that I am not adhering to by doing this? It just looks a bit unprofessional to have [] in the window title.
Any ideas?
There's nothing wrong with that at all. As a matter of fact, many of the biggest ERP applications do similar things.
In my opinion, though, the first part of the title should either be the name of the application or the name of the window. Anything else should go after that. It just makes it easier to read.
Something like this, maybe:
ApplicationName - Transport Order 123456 - UserName
Both the Windows UX Guidelines and Apple HIG have rules for naming windows. However, the specific rules are oriented towards document-type applications rather than database-type applications like ERP. Nonetheless the general principles apply.
The primary purpose of the window title is to make it easy for users to distinguish their windows. For this reason both Windows UX Guidelines and Apple HIG recommend windows be titled by their content, since that is usually what users will be looking for to choose a window to click on. Other potentially useful information, like the program name, may follow the content identity. The Windows UX Guidelines, for example recommends a “document name – program name” format (p316). You want the most distinguishing information first in the title so it's easiest to see, especially when looking at the task bar for which the name is often truncated. Also, the icon represents the program identity, so the program name is a little redundant anyway.
Multi-window ERP apps likewise should distinguish their windows by their content. Thus generally, the title should start with the window name, identifying the class of data shown in the window, followed by any filtering or querying criteria of the data. This order assumes users are more likely to have open two different windows than two instances of the same window with different filtering criteria. The title may end with the program or application name, if you think it’s necessary. So an example title would be something like:
Shipments (Ship Date: 2008-01-01 to 2010-01-01) ERP-O-Rama
It may be helpful to include the user who created or "owns" the data if that is different than the user currently looking at the data, but that still doesn't sound like something that distinguishes windows -are users going to be looking two different versions of the same content created by two different users? It seems at best to be secondary information to put at the end of the title if there at all. Why do users need to know this? Perhaps it should be a field in the window or a property in a Properties dialog.
You certainly don't need the current user's name in the title, unless users can be simultaneously logged in under different identities (e.g., they’re Jakob Nielsen for one window but Jared Spool for another). Users generally know who they are, so it seems like unnecessary clutter to me. If users may be logged in as different users or roles for different sessions (which is generally not a good idea) then you may want to represent that in the status bar, but not the title bar.
Brackets vs. parentheses vs. dashes seem like a matter of taste to me. Windows generally prefers em-dashes. My only advice is to use them only when necessary to delimit substrings. "[USR]" doesn't seem appropriate unless there may be spaces in the username.
Do your users care if you break a "usability rule", so long as what you do makes the program more usable? That is, if putting the username in the title enhances usability for your specific users, strict adherence to some standard comes secondary.
Put the needs of your user first. If putting the user's name in the title bar enhances usability, by all means do it.
I recommend something like
123456 - Joe User
The square brackets aren't necessary, and neither is the phrase "Transport Order" unless you need them for disambiguation.