We have a long for which has 3 sections: requester, shipping and billing each section screen or more long so the form is 3+ screens long. From usability perspective what is the best way to display messages on the form. Grouped list of error messages at the top of the form. Grouped messages for each section at the top of the section ...
In a fairly graphics intsensive application the requirements state that it should default to full screen mode even though the application is running under Windows. I know many games do this but I find it annoying. The default IMO should be to open in a window rather than full screen mode. I am proposing the first time the user runs th...
In my experience, UI programming is very time consuming, expensive (designers, graphics, etc) and error prone - and by definition UI bugs or glitches are very visible embarasing. What do you do to mitigate this problem? Do you know of a solution that can automatically convert an API to a user interface (preferably a Web user interface?...
We are developing a product which provides an API interface, so other developers can use some functionality of main product. This is already implemented and documented. But I'm not sure that this is very useful, and documentation is very clear for developers. How we can find people to review this feature? What type of person should it...
I'm working on a product which is meant to be simple to use and simple to set up, the competition largely requiring a long set up period and in some cases going as far as a bespoke solution for each customer. One part of our application is now expanding based on customer requests and it is looking like we'll need to make it very flexible...
In Visual Studio, when I create a new script containing a stored procedure, my usual course to run it on our databases is to right click and select "Run On". In the database references window, I add/select what I need and run. We've just switched database servers in our development environment and a number of the references here are no...
What patterns contribute or detract from the usability of a CLI interface? As an example consider the CLI for ClearCase. The CLI is very comprehensive (+1) but it is has several glaring opportunities. Recently, I wanted to force the files to lower case into ClearCase using clearfsimport. Unfortunately I wound up on the documentation ...
From a usability perspective, is it better to integrate admin section on the main website or have a separate section to manage content? Any thoughts are greatly appreciated. EDIT: the application is a CMS for very non-techno friendly staff. ...
I want to write a program that analyzes your fantasy baseball team and notifies you of recommended actions, possibly multiple times per day. The problem is, you aren't playing fantasy baseball on my site, you're playing on yahoo, or cbs, or espn, etc. On the majority of these sites, fantasy teams and leagues are not public, so you must...
I know this isn't strictly program related, but I think I've seen this answer on SO before and lost track of it. The specific question has to do with reading an electronic document. I find it helpful to move the cursor across the words as I'm reading them. This works great with Word documents, but I'm unable to do it with web pages. Is...
I've got a "Main Window" containing quite a few things, including, in the status bar (at the very bottom of the window), a "Support" button, which the user can use at any time to open a window containing our support phone number, along with a little chat functionality if the user prefers to chat with us. The problem is that if the progr...
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 envi...
Where can I find examples of very well produced enterprise-y software that have: Good, consistent use of keyboard shortcuts. Good keyboard form navigation Standarized form validation Standarized use of lookup/search screens. (User gets asked for Client ID, doesn't know it but can look it up from a popup window that returns it) Standari...
Say I've got an app with a laughably awful GUI setup screen. I could fit 90% of the properties I need to let the user set up with one of those boxes that look like ▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪ ▪height ▪ 1.3in ▪ ▪width ▪ 3.0in ▪ ▪top ▪ 3.2in ▪ ▪left ▪ 2.3in ▪ ▪caption ▪ 'awesome'▪ ▪order ▪ 3rd ▪ ▪▪▪...
Are there any open source frameworks that are for this purpose? How does UI design differ when designing a software appliance console from traditional web applications? Any examples of particularly well-design user interfaces for software appliances? ...
Some fancy websites show an error dialog when it is detected that an untrained shopper has entered a credit/debit card number as it is printed on their card with spaces. Is it possible in some way to write a Java web app that handles these numbers with spaces as if they were correct? ...
I have a usability problem in my Spring webapp which uses Tiles as the view technology. At the moment all of the pages display the same HEAD_TITLE and the PAGE_TITLE is page specific: <html> <head><title>HEAD_TITLE</title></head> <body> <h1>PAGE_TITLE</h1> </body> </html> This is a major usability problem as the browsers history...
Hello! I have trouble getting JPopupMenu's position. What I need is: to be able to right click on the work area, click some menu item, and it would create an element "in place", so right under the position of the previously displayed menu. I tried getting the position of the menu itself and of its items, but it gives me constant value...
I have a custom ItemRenderer that displays 5 text inputs in each of 3 panels: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <mx:VBox xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" height="300" width="800" creationComplete="onCreationComplete()" > <!-- code-behind --> <mx:Script source="ChainListRenderer.mxml.as" /> <mx...
At work, I have access to many appliances ranging from DataPower to Cisco to F5 and so on. Each of the user interfaces for configuration seem to have a different layout where on some the navigation is on the side while on others it is on the top. How do usability guidelines vary based on whether something is a user website vs something...