When I hover my mouse over a button in my program (Vista) the button turns blue (glows), I need to improve the way I guide my users through the program so I'm considering highlighting the appropriate button indicating the next step. Does this sound the wrong way to go or acceptable? I'm presuming I can code the button to glow.
Thanks
If you are using WPF this would be easy to do using styles and control templates. You will probably want to look into the new Visual State Manager functionality. Consider each "step" a state and color buttons appropriately.
Another alleyway to look into are the use of Adorners to highlight the area around or beside controls with things like arrows and colored borders.
It depends on your target audience. Do you need to be cognizant of accessibility and users who are color blind, or legally blind? Additionally users can change the visual style of the OS, so you can't necessarily rely on being able to reproduce the "hover" effect.
In general, your UI design should be intuitive enough that you needn't add explicit visual cues on how to use it. Then again, it depends on what kind of app it is and what you are trying to achieve.
Aye, in WinForm you'd just run an animation on the mouse hover event.
I think it is a nice way to go (although perhaps you're better off focusing on functionality first ;) ) as it is a pretty UI cue which always looks good.
You shouldn't need colour to act as the next step indicator. What is it about your application that prevents "Next" or "Continue" buttoms from being used? Typically I'd stick with the expected norms that users for a particular platform have become accustomed too.
For 90% of applications, users just want to get something done as quickly and effectively as possible. So if you need colour to advise them of the next step then chances are your UI is too complicated. You may need to refactor some of your current single step screens into 2 or more less complicated screens.
Personally i think the better UI designs are the ones that we barely even notice. If the user has to waste brain cycles interpreting a UIs navigation system that requires them to associate blue with Go or Next then frankly i think its failed.... specially since where i come from "Green" would be more likely to mean "Go".
Btw who says you "need" to improve its navigation?? Do you really "need" too? Or do you just want to show off some potentially really cool, but probably completely unhelpful programming trick you just learnt? Cmon, be honest ;)