Forms design resources/advice? 3

[oppcos]

I'm struggling with making busy forms look good and flow well. Do you all have advice from a design perspective to help make busy user interfaces more usable and/or do you know of any good resources/tutorials on the web regarding visual design to make forms seem more functional?

Thanks for any advice!

 

[chiph]

Your best bet would be to talk to your users to see how they intend on using the form. In the past, I've been surprised at how they've ordered elements on a form because there are certain fields they use all the time, and they want them clustered up top where they're easy to get to. Which is often the exact opposite of how a programmer would arrange them.

Chip H.


____________________________________________________________________
If you want to get the best response to a question, please read FAQ222-2244 first

 

[oppcos]

True enough. That's one reason I asked here, there's a lot of advice online but it is hard to sift the good from the bad to the sometimes good without the real-world advice from an experienced developer.

Good advice about communication with the users. More C# related, do you find that the groupbox control is good for grouping like form controls, or do you use other methods? My forms just seem kind of.. old school and clunky, like an old Access database.. I have a lot of odd number of similarly grouped items and am struggling how to present them.

 

[NeilTrain]

try using the standard "Wizard" layout.

I really wowed a lot of users when I switched my startup form from a busy looking mess to a step by step wizard.

Instead of having a bunch of controls on one page, you have multiple pages, each with just a small logical grouping of controls, then hit "Next" to the next set, etc

 

[JurkMonkey]

I find myself breaking a form up into "tabs" if you will. I don't like the MS Tab control too much so I tend to use a set of navigation buttons on the left of my form to split up the sections.