Silverlight Form Design for the Enterprise

Question

I’m currently involved in the design of a prototype Silverlight 3 application used by call centre operators in an enterprise who take queries via phone and email. The intention of the prototype is to demonstrate how Silverlight can be used to improve the UX and overcome some of the hurdles of using ASP.NET webforms in a high latency environment. I won’t go into the details of the environment or the rationale of Silverlight 3 vs 2 or WPF, this question is about usability;

I’m looking for examples of good user interface design suitable for the above requirement that highlight some of the benefits of Silverlight. It’s a prototype so it can be a bit sexier than your usual enterprise app and have a few more bells and whistles than you’d usually get from user requirements. The goal is to both provide something functional and introduce the “wow” factor. Appreciate any resources or examples you can think of.

Answer 1

I like the way it encourages (forces) all your service calls to be asynchronous. From the UX point of view it means that your form is not locked up while performing a potentially laggy operation.

Animations are nice too. While they're often considered useless fluff, they can reduce the amount of surprise the user experiences when something suddenly changes. They can also be used to draw attention in a more subtle way that a messagebox in the face.

Answer 2

Have you seen http://quince.infragistics.com? Although not specific to Silverlight it's full of proven UI methods - not Infragistics specific!

I find it very useful when designing forms and controls, maybe you will find some good suggestions there.

Answer 3

You've got a stateful client - one of the interesting things to do is leverage that state. For example:

1. Task centric UI with multiple active tasks. Each task represents a process/workflow that has begun, but not yet completed. Especially useful in scenarios where ther are interrupts.

2. Auto-save drafts to local isolated storage in case the app restarts, browser closes etc. Any partially filled forms can be restored when the app is re-launched.

The other thing is context... or preserving context of the task at hand. For example, if you want to do a lookup, you can popup a dialog, rather than navigate away from the current page.

Just some quick ideas...