Creativity in form design

[stricknyn]

Hello, all,

While I excel at programming both using VB and MS Access, I suck at the creative aspect of designing Access and VB forms. When I say creative, I mean designing forms that are applealing to the users eye but not too flashy where it disturbs them from getting their work done. Does anyone know any sites I could go to look at some sample Access and VB forms? These would give me some good ideas in terms of creating a good looking form.

Thanks in advance!

Strick

[dee-u]

Perhaps you could use some skinner....

[Hack]

Try Googleing 'Form Design' vb6

[szlamany]

Joel on software has some good points...

Here's one of the links that might give you some good info - there are other pages at his websites that I've read in the past that are great.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook...000000057.html

Keep it simple - be consistent - avoid stupid flashy worthless stuff - it's only confusing...

Follow WINDOW's standards - everyone knows these anyway!

[Hack]

Follow WINDOW's standards - everyone knows these anyway!

Follow this piece of advice like it was straight from the Bible!!!!!!!!!!!

[szlamany]

WINDOWS standards...

Here's some stories from my past 4 years about what users expect. I've only been doing PC programming for 4 years, so I'm relatively new to this type of user interface. We've done mainframe/green screen systems for decades - so I was forced to leave my comfort zone and come over to the PC world...

First - I fought the TAB key - I thought it was useless. ENTER is next to the numeric keypad - why wasn't that good enough. Well I ended up giving in - we support both TAB and ENTER to move from field to field.

FILE>EXIT menu - I fought that. I figured anyone could simply hit the X in the upper right hand corner to exit from my app. I gave in eventually - now we have a FILE>EXIT menu.

MENU's in general. Users expect FILE, EDIT, VIEW, some app specific ones and then HELP - they expect these. Ours are FILE, EDIT, VIEW, FORMS, OUTPUT and HELP. Originally just FILE, FORMS and HELP - back when we were in early development. When we decided to add the others we had them "greyed-out" for a while. The users expect them to be there - even if they are disabled - they expect them to be there.

Those silly questions - DO YOU REALLY WANT TO SAVE - DO YOU REALLY WANT TO CANCEL. We looked at what WORD and EXCEL had for options and made sure we were close to those. Users don't want to be thrown a question that seems familiar but has some basic difference like the DEFAULT is not YES or NO.

We did decide to not have a YES, NO, CANCEL button on these questions. JOEL on SOFTWARE made some good points about this. Not everything that WINDOW's does is perfect - some of it is because they have conventions that are huge - and have to serve all the aspects. The YES, NO, CANCEL buttons are one of those, in my opinion. If you are going to ask a question - it only has a YES or NO answer. What does CANCEL do? Most users are confused at that third option...

Where do controls go - upper left hand corner is the default spot. Could be because some screens have different resolutions - whatever the reason - but the WINDOW's standard is that menus and buttons and toolbars go in the upper left corner. Don't go having a SAVE button in the lower right - that is just not where it goes.

COLORS - this is a hard one. Everyone has a different monitor and diff OS that will show colors and shades differently. We decided to be intentionally bland with colors - and when we do use a color - it's either the 8 VB constants or the 16 QB colors. Going off into some image editor to find the proper shade of purple will look blue on some old monitor.

Even with the bland colors - we use YELLOW for a cell with bad data in it and GREEN in the first cell of a ROW to indicate the row has been changed. Well during a recent demo with a projector in a big room, that expensive projector showed the GREEN and YELLOW as exactly the same color. Made the presentation very difficult for me...

[Hack]

In addition, I have a requirement that all applications have a toolbar with buttons on it that does precisely what the drop down menus items do. It provides the users with a choice of how they want to interact with the interface.

Also, right mouse click popup menus are a standard is all software we produce.

We are also required to have an "Options" or "Preferences" screen which permit the users the ability to configure the interface to suit their likes/dislikes. One of the options on these screens is to turn off the messages boxes (ex: the "Are you sure" message boxes), and to display system messages in either a message box, or the status bar (which is also a standard)

[dee-u]

...The YES, NO, CANCEL buttons are one of those, in my opinion. If you are going to ask a question - it only has a YES or NO answer. What does CANCEL do? Most users are confused at that third option...

In data entry forms 'PERHAPS' when a user 'accidentally' or 'purposely' clicked an exit/close button the YES, NO, CANCEL (with a message "Do you want to save the record first before exiting?") might give him/her the choice of saving the record first (YES), quit without saving (NO), or cancel the exiting/closing (CANCEL).... Hmmmnnnn, just my thought....

[szlamany]

In data entry forms 'PERHAPS' when a user 'accidentally' or 'purposely' clicked an exit/close button the YES, NO, CANCEL (with a message "Do you want to save the record first before exiting?") might give him/her the choice of saving the record first (YES), quit without saving (NO), or cancel the exiting/closing (CANCEL).... Hmmmnnnn, just my thought....

You are thinking like a programmer - which I also do way too often...

User clicks X by accident.

Doesn't really want to exit - but does want to save - saving is the paramount issue.

YES and NO - do you want to save - those answers and that question match.

CANCEL - that doesn't apply to the question - it applies to the action that led to the question. That action was unintentional - so most likely they don't even know how they got to that question.

But they do want to SAVE - that they do know.

Having a button related to the unintentional action of the inexperienced user is just like the overuse of wizards when you don't want them!

[BruceG]

Here are a couple of links that may be useful:
http://users.ticino.com/usr/dgautschi/microsoft/
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~kobsa/course...Guidelines.pdf

[demotivater]

I also had a problem with form design even though I had the coding part down pretty good. hack and slazamy's advice is right on, definitely stick with the standards and don't make using the forms any harder than it has to be. Stay away from the flashy tricks you've seen on code sites, etc. Just a normal form that WORKS. My first interfaces tried too hard and turned out making people hate using the program. My current "big" app I didn't do anything out of the ordinary, but it turned out cool and it's very popular.

[dee-u]

Perhaps the correct message might be....

"Do you want to save the record first before exiting? Click YES to save before exiting, click NO to exit without saving, click CANCEL to resume keying-in data..."

[Hack]

Perhaps the correct message might be....

"Do you want to save the record first before exiting? Click YES to save before exiting, click NO to exit without saving, click CANCEL to resume keying-in data..."

Before I had to adhere to commerical software development standards, I had forms that if a Save or Cancel was required, I'd disable the X at the top right of the screen and the Close menu item on the System menu. The only way out was to either Save what you had done, or hit Cancel (I hate, loath, despise and do not have a vocabulary large enough to adqueately describe how much I detest, message boxes of any type, size, shape or manner. If someone is stupid enough to hit the X, then they should lose what they have just done - but customer like 'em so I gotta code 'em)

I'm not allowed to do the disable thing anymore. I have to but in message boxes. (But, every option screen I code I build in the ability to turn them all off )