Designing a main form ("main menu") for a WinForm application

Question

The form that currently loads during when our beta WinForm application starts up is one that shows a vast array of buttons... "Inventory", "Customers", "Reports", etc. Nothing too exciting.

I usually begin UI by looking at similar software products to see how they get done, but as this is a corporate application, I really can't go downloading other corporate applications.

I'd love to give this form a bit of polish but I'm not really sure where to start. Any suggestions?

EDIT: I am trying to come up with multiple options to present to users, however, I'm drawing blanks as well. I can find a ton of design ideas for the web, but there really doesn't seem to be much for Windows form design.

Answer 1

Have you tried asking your end users what they would like? After all they are the ones that are going to be using the system.

Answer 2

I use components from the company DevExpress. They have some really cool controls (such as the Office 2007 ribbon), form skinning utilities (with a vast amount of different skins), and a load more...

If you want to check it out they have 60 free components - if its corporate though you might have to check the licence but you can get it at... DevExpress 60 Free

Answer 3

I have found that given no option, users will have a hard time to say what they want. Once given an option, it's usually easier for them to find things to change. I would suggest making some paper sketches of potential user interfaces for you application. Then sit down with a few users and discuss around them. I would imagine that you would get more concrete ideas from the users that way.

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Update

Just a couple of thoughts that may (or may not) help you get forward:

• Don't get too hung up on the application being "corporate". Many coprorate applications that I have seen look so boring that I feel sorry for the users that need to see them for a good share of their day.
• Look at your own favourite UI's and ask yourself why you like them.
• While not getting stuck in the "corporate template", also do not get too creative; the users collected experience comes from other applications and it may be good if they can guess how things work without training.
• Don't forget to take in inspiration from web sites that you find appealing and easy to use.
• Try to find a logical "flow"; visualize things having the same conceptual functionality in a consistent way; this also helps the user do successful "guesswork".

Answer 4

You might look to other applications that your users are familiar with. Outlook is ubiquitous in my company, and we were able to map our application to its interface relatively easily, so we used that application as a model when developing our UI.

Note that I'm not suggesting Outlook specifically to you, just that you look for UIs that would make your users' learning curve shallower.

Answer 5

I suggest starting with the design principles suggested by Microsoft: Windows User Experience Interaction Guidelines

Answer 6

Some places to get ideas for interaction designs:

Books

About Face 3 - The Essentials of Interaction Design

Don't Make Me Think (this is focused on web design, but many of the principles carry over to Windows design)

Web Sites

Windows User Experience Interaction Guidelines

In addition, many applications have free trial versions that you can download to determine how they handle user interaction. Also, don't discount items on your desktop right now.

Answer 7

Do you have any statistics or insights concerning what the most commonly-used or important functions might be? If so, you could use that to pare down your "vast array of buttons" and highlight only those that are most important.

That's sort of a trivial example, but the underlying point is that your understanding of your audience should inform your design, at least from a functional perspective. You might have past usage statistics, or user stories, or documented workflows, or whatever - even if you're drawing a blank right now, remember that you have to know something about your users, otherwise you wouldn't be able to write software for them.

Building on what they already know can make it easy on your users. Do they live in Outlook? Then you might want to mimic that (as Michael Petrotta suggested). Do they typically do the same thing (within a given role) every time they use the app? Then look for a simple, streamlined interface. Are they power users? Then they'll likely want to be able to tweak and customize the interface. Maybe you even have different menu forms for different user roles.

At this stage, I wouldn't worry about getting it right; just relax and put something out there. It almost doesn't matter what you design, because if you have engaged users and you give them the option, they're going to want to change something (everything?) anyway. ;-)

Answer 8

The problem here is that you need some good user analysis and I'm guessing you've only done functional analysis.

Because your problem is so abstract, it's hard to give one good example of what you need to do. I'd go to usability.gov and check out the usability methods link, especially card sorting and contextual interviews.

Basically you want to do two things:

1- Discover where your users think how information is grouped on the page: This will help flesh out your functional requirements too. Once you've got information all grouped up, you've basically got your navigation metaphor set up. Also, you can continually do card sorting exercises right down to page and function levels - e.g. you do one card sorting session to understand user needs, then you take one group of cards and ask users to break that down into ranks of importance. Doing so will help you understand what needs to be in dominate areas of the screen and what can be hidden.

2- Understand what tools they already use: what they do and don't like about them. You need to get a list of tools/applications that they use externally and internally. Internally is probably the most important because there is a fair chance that most people in your business will share an experience of using it. External tools however might help give you context into how your users think.

Also, don't be afraid to get pencil and paper and sketch up ideas with users. People generally understand that sketches are a quick and useful way to help with early design work and you can get an immense amount of information out of them with just simple sketches. Yes, even do this if you suck at sketching - chances are it won't matter. In fact, crappy sketches could even work in your favour because then nobody is going to argue if buttons should be blue, red or whatever.

Answer 9

Frankly, a form with a “vast array of buttons” needs more than a little polish. A form dedicated solely to navigation generally means you’re giving your users unnecessary work. Provide a pulldown or sidebar menu on each form for navigating to any form.

The work area of your starting form should provide users with something to actually accomplish their tasks. Among the options are:

1. A “dashboard” main form, showing summarized information about the users’ work (e.g., list of accounts to review and status of each, number of orders at each stage of processing, To Do schedule). Ideally, users should be able to perform their most common tasks directly in the opening form (e.g., mark each account as “approved” or not). If further information is necessary to complete a task, links navigate to detailed forms filled with the proper query results. At the very least users should be able to assess the status of their work without going any further. Note that different groups of users may need different things on their respective dashboards.

2. Default form or forms. Users of a corporate application typically have specific assignments, often involving only one to three of all your forms. Users who work with Inventory, for example, may almost never need to look at Customer records, and vice versa. Users also often work on a specific subset of records. Each sales rep, for example may be assigned a small portion of the total number of customers in the database. Divide your users into groups based on the forms and records they usually use. For each user group, start the app by automatically opening the user group’s form(s) populated with the query results of their records. Users should be able to complete most of their work without any further navigation or querying.

3. If all else fails, open the app to whatever forms and content were last open when the user quit the app. Many corporate users will continue to work tomorrow on the same or similar stuff they’re working on today.

Analyze the tasks of your users to determine which of the above options to use. It is generally not productive to describe each option to the users and ask which they like better.

BTW, “Reports” is probably not a particularly good navigation option. It’s better if you consistently identify things primarily by what they show, rather than how they show it. Users may not know that the information they want to see is in a “report” rather than a form, but they’ll know what content they want to see. Reports on inventory are accessed under Inventory; reports about sales are accessed under Sales.