Software like OneNote has shown that auto-save can be implemented, and it works just as well (or better) as the manual save button / CTRL+S. Anyways everything that you work on you want saved. Its just if you're trying out something destructive that you would close without saving. So from a programmers/usability perspective, why is the...
Has anyone done any research on user acceptance of the following voting systems for different target audiences? Or I'm not interested which is more accurate or how the votes will be used for ranking. What I'm interested is from a user perspective, which is more intuitive - based on the demographic of that user. Obviously, as deve...
I tried to design the ui with some ui mocking software, but i found it's hard for me to settle down all the detail of the design, since the database didn't design yet. But if i first design software, then the same problem occur, I didn't have the UI, how can I create a prominent UI ? ...
So we're re-designing a desktop application so that it's also usable with thye Touch Interface with Windows 7. We've consulted the UX guidelines. For some part of the UI, there are toolbox icons that are disabled because of some arcane rules (the software communicates with a hardware device). We disable the actions that aren't applicabl...
This type of UIs are frequently displayed in various web-Sites and .net books. Are these types of User-Interfaces acceptable and/or popular in commercial and/or customized Business Software? Please note (1) the use of Binding Navigator, and (2) the placement of Master-grid, Detail-grid and Input Area in the same form. To me a sea...
I have somewhat of a strange question that is not really technical, but I do hope to collect meaningful advice. I'm building a large web application, basically a photo sharing community site. As part of this site, logged-in users can go to their profile, from which they can see their own things (images, comments, votes) as well as edit...
Of so clear separation of UI is unique to XAML? I mean, you could even customize the entire UI of a 'pre-packaged control/component'... Any light on other technologies that achieve this? ...
I've been working on a small program which gets a list of url's from the web server ( latest forum topics ) and warns the user whenever a new topic is created. So the main form of my program have a list of buttons. Each button has the text of the forum topic and extra information below. Opens the browser with the topics url when user p...
I'm thinking of setting the timeout on all my tooltips in a WinForms application to infinity (or an extremely large value). The motivation is that it's annoying for the user if the tooltip disappears while I'm still reading it, without providing any extra value whatsoever as far as I can tell. Normally I wouldn't ask something like this...
In the application that I am working on, there is tabular data (for the record, it is a Java Swing app using JTables). In some cases the data is sortable by clicking on the column headers. What I want to know is what is a good way to indicate to the user if a given column is sortable or not? I have come up with the following possibiliti...
I'm asking all those who have apps in the Apple iPhone App Store. Do you have an "About..." window/page/view in your app, or do you rely on iTunes for providing the developer info to the customer? If the former, where's the button/link to that? Real estate is so precious on the iPhone screen, I cannot think of some space I can waste for ...
I'm currently working on a small utility program that only requires a command line interface, and I started wondering if Java provided any standard way of creating the CLI, in a similar way that Swing and the likes exist for GUIs. I'm not really interested in command line parameters and parsing of them, but rather the command based inter...
In a typical business application it is quite common to have forms that are used for searching. Some basic features are: A pane that contains the search criteria A grid to display the results Sorting on the grid A detail page that opens when an item is selected in the results grid What other features would you expect in a business a...
I think we're all aware of what "your company's line-of-business software" looks like. Are there any resources, rules of advice, or general tricks to visually taming applications like this? Our business's domain is pretty complex, as most are, and our customers demand a great amount of flexibility. Tracking a boatload of fields on e...
You know how in Firefox, if something happens that requires your attention but isn't immediately urgent enough to require a modal dialog, it will drop down a little strip at the top of the tab with a question on it? I'd like to be able to put functionality like that in a Delphi app, but I don't know if there's a component for that. Doe...
Hey everyone, I have a dillema where our client relations department has been brought in for advice on UI and I vehemently disagree with it...even though I don't consider myself a designer at all. While I have been vocal about my disagreement about it, I've been asked to point to design standards to prove that what I'm saying is correc...
I have a parent class that holds all of the fields that are common between all device types. From that, I have a few derived classes that each hold their unique fields. Say I have device type "Switch" and "Transformer". Both derived classes only have 2-3 of their own unique fields. When doing the UI design (windows forms) in this case. ...
My iPad app uses a splitView. Where should I stick a button to bring up an about dialog? Thanks ...
Very often we have to make up standard messages to show user. It can be an error or a warning message, whatever. Has anybody seen somewhere a site with such messages? ...
How should I be using color in my application? I have over a 100 different forms (windows) in my application, and the default windows grey seems like a bad choice to me. One school of thought says pick one neutral color, and use the same one everywhere. Another school of thought says pick a set of neutral colors, and use them same one...