I need to implement a threaded view of sorts in an old VB6 app. It should look similar to this:
So, it's like a TreeView of sorts but there are buttons on the right (for each row) that could be pressed. The view does not need to collapse - it always stays in the expanded mode. The users should be able to respond to each node (via the comment button on the far right). And, of course, users should be able to scroll through the entries.
What are some of the ways I could implement this? I am open to 3rd party controls, paid or not.
VSFlexGrid has an outline mode. You can set the indent per row via the RowOutlineLevel property. It supports word wrap, images, etc within its cells/columns so you should be able to get pretty close to what you want. It also supports owner-drawn which lets you fully customize the cell painting (for example, to get those rounded corners).
I'm sure there are other controls out there as well...
In the bing maps app on windows phone, when I click the search button I get a search box sliding in from the top of the screen, and the keyboard sliding in from the bottom. I want to achieve the same behaviour in my own windows phone app (based around a bing map control).
I will want a few drop-in boxes, such as for setting up a filter (which will need a few check boxes and text entry), and adding an item (which will require a text entry for the name, and ideally still allow the map in the main panel to be panned to fine-tune the location of the item).
I'm pretty sure the keyboard comes up automatically when a textbox gets focus, but I'm not sure what might be the best approach for dropping in the search box. It looks like it would need something with storyboards/animations/projections, but I haven't found a clear standard approach so far, and I want to make sure I do it the right way from the start (as I don't really have time to do it twice).
Is there a standard/best practice way to achieve the effect?
Yes, and you don't need a single line of code. You can express the whole animation using XAML. Get a text on Silverlight and read the chapters on animation with particular reference to storyboards and Easing.
I want to create a form with iOS like transitions (in a Cocoa desktop application) between the form input. For instance, the user would input information to the form and click next to continue to input the remainder of the information. On the last form, the user would click submit. Upon clicking next, the form would have an animated transition, like on the iPhone before displaying the next set of forms. Sort of like how Turbo Tax ask a ton of questions before allowing you to submit that grouped information.
What would be the best approach to achieve this goal?
This is commonly referred to as a wizard.
You basically have two options:
Use a tabless tab view, following Apple's sample code in AnimatingTabView from http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#samplecode/Reducer/Introduction/Intro.html
Manually swap the views in and out yourself.
There are pros and cons to both approaches. Which you choose will probably depend on your requirements. One issue with Core Animation on the desktop is lack of subpixel rendering for layer-backed views. This is mostly an issue with text display but some people find it not to be an issue.
I've needed this functionality a few times. I used this tutorial to get started.
I would like to design a GUI dashboard for a document management application. The dashboard contains only documents thumbnails. Each document may belong to a few hierarchies (e.g. "topic" hierarchy, "language" hierarchy, "genre" hierarchy, etc.) A user may want to select math texts in English, or lyrics in all Roman languages, etc.
How would you design a GUI for this ? What if the dashboard runs in a multi-touch tablet device ? What are examples of such GUI ?
I sketched these examples that would work with mouse or touch:
1) Dropdown Tags: You can use a approach similar to what Delicious do with tags, but put tags under hierarchies which you can chose on dropdown menus right on the top. The documents are filtered on real time while you choose the filters. It would be interesting to save an old filters for quickly navigation.
2) CheckBox: If you have few filter and options you can keep a bunch of checkbox on the side and filter the documents on real time:
However, it is hard to come with a UI like that, I think you should prototype and ask for the user to test what is better.
When you design a UI interface, remember that the user has to know where they are in a system. They need to know what they can do next; and what will happen when they do it and get there.
The most intuitive GUI for any user will be one whose interface they're already familiar with.
This way, they won't have to spend time thinking about what would happen when they perform a certain action.
Browser UI's and File explorer UI's are some such examples.
Hovering on a file to see a semi-transparent pop-up which lists options of what to do with the file is another way to enhance usability without cluttering the screen with navigation aids. (this works even for multitouch screens)
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I'm writing an internal-tools webapp; one of the central pages in this tool has a whole bunch of related commands the user can execute by clicking one of a number of buttons on the page, like this:
toolbar http://img709.imageshack.us/img709/1928/commands.png
Ideally, all of the buttons would fit on one line. Ordinarily I'd do this by changing each widget from a button with a (sometimes long) text label to a simple, compact icon - e.g.
button labelled "Save" http://img337.imageshack.us/img337/773/saver.png
could be replaced by a familiar disk icon:
Unfortunately, I don't think I can do this for every button on this particular page. Some of the command buttons just don't have good visual analogs - "VDS List". Or, if I needed to add another button in the future for some other kind of list, I'd need two icons that both communicate "list-ness" and which list. So, I'm still considering this option, but I don't love it.
So it's come time for me to add yet another button to this section (don't you love internal tools?). There's not enough room on that single line to fit the new button. Aside from the icon solution I already mentioned, what would be a good* way to simplify/declutter/reduce or otherwise improve this UI?
*As per Jakob Nielsen's article, I'd like to think that a dropdown menu is not the solution.
Edit: I'm not looking for input about the icon idea. I'm looking for other solutions. Sorry my example disk icon was a small one; it was just an example. I'm showing a bigger one now to hopefully be more clear.
I would add a More Link Like Google does.
See the Top Bar of Google with WeB Images Map More >>
To this more >> drop down you can add logic to add button less frequently used by user or something like that.
If you read Jef (and Aza) Raskin, you'll probably realize that icons are also not a good solution – both were pretty vocal in their dislike for them (with very few notable exceptions). For a start they're even harder to hit than tiny buttons, then their symbols can be confusing, culture-dependent and misleading. We're already good at reading text, parsing and interpreting icons is often slower.
In any case, that button bar looks like it accommodates pretty much anyone and their dog who might be using that product. You might have had some specific scenarios in mind when creating it that should be easy to do and are important. Most likely not all buttons are needed at once for such a task to complete.
Another thing is that maybe not all buttons are even useful at any single state of the application. Can you maybe branch into different sets of buttons, depending on the state. That's only possible however, if each state has clearly defined what actions can be taken. If all buttons are equally pressable regardless of state this won't do anything.
Grouping commands according to related functionality might also be an option. This doesn't have to be done with menu-like idioms, you can also put them into containers with different background color or even color the buttons themselves (just keep in mind color blindness, though). Depending on how related those individual functions are this can be a good way of speeding up interaction. It might requier some training for users to know what the colors refer to but for an in-house tool that's only used by people you know (instead of by arbitrary random ones [which is a problem Microsoft faces quite prominently]) this should pose not much of a problem.
What if you use icons and text?
For the commonly understood commands - use just an icon (like the save)
For the uncommon commands use an Icon + the text.
If you put a border around the button as a whole it should tie the icons / text together nicely and show it's still a button. You could also do some hover effects.
Since you can't do a dropdown menu (or similar techniques like clicking a button to generate a secondary menu). The best I can think of is what Prescott did or showing an area of buttons that are grouped in such a way to make it easy for the user to know which section their button should be in.
I would start by changing some of the longer labels. At a minimum, "Application Loading" could be abbreviated "App Loading." What's another (shorter) way to say "Quick File Transfer"?
You could also group the buttons into tabs (i.e. make it a ribbon). That might work particularly well if different classes of users tend to use different, non-overlapping sets of buttons.
Numerous options:
Group and labeling. Any time you have more than eight commands, you should divide the menu items into semantic groups of about four to help the user scan for the command they want. Labeling the groups also helps the scan and can make the menu more compact. For example, Instead of VDS Ping and VDS List, Have a group labeled “VDS” with “Ping” and “List” menu items. You’ve one less word to fit in (two if you put the label above it’s associated menu items when using a horizontal orientation).
Pulldown menus. Nielsen is correct about avoiding the use of a dropdown menu for making commands. However, he’s clearly in favor of pulldown menus which look and behave like a menubar in a thick client app (Nielsen calls them “command” and “navigation” menus). I think you’ll find that there are several Javascript pulldown menus out there now, unlike back in 2000 when Nielsen wrote his post. You can fit 100s of commands in a menubar.
Sidebar menu. Arraying the menu items vertically and you should be able to fit 20 or more commands and you won’t have to shorten any command names to something user might not understand. If that’s not enough, consider a “menu bank” than combines the benefits of sidebar menu with the capacity of a pulldown menu.
Ribbon. If your commands fit into discrete tasks, where the user tends to stick to one task for a while, you can arrange the buttons on a tab control, with one sheet per task.
Command Overloading. Represent your data objects as selectable entities in your window and change your commands into more general operations, like Drill-down, Create, Copy, Move, Delete, and Link, that can be applied to various different classes of objects, thereby reducing your total number of commands. The user can select one or more data objects then select the desired command to act on them.
Work Area Attributes. Some of your commands may not be commands by settings or attributes. Remove them from the menu and represent them as data objects in the work area of the page (or another page, if they are rarely used) using controls like radio buttons, dropdown lists, and check boxes. This has the added benefit clearly showing the user the current setting as well as providing a means to change it.
Variants. For an internal app, you probably have formal roles and responsibilities that vary by work position. Include the user’s position in your model, and dynamically hide commands (and other controls and pages) that aren't relevant to that position.
What about a combobox and a Confirm button?
Or a simple dropdown menu?
Add a "Tools" or "Actions" menu bar, and stick rightmost 4 commands (or more) into the menu.
Would it be possible to implement a "most used" or "preferred" set of buttons (preferably for the user, but globally if necessary) and button to take you to the rest of the items if you need one of those?
You could group them (like the two 'vds' buttons) behind a single button that, when clicked pops a context menu with the individual icons.
It truly seems like what you're developing is a administration console which happens to present its UI through a web page, rather than something which I'd quantify as a web app. As such, especially given your statement that this is an internal use application, Jakob Nielson's advice regarding <select> tags being poor design need not apply.
For this particular set of assumptions, I think the better option is to imitate a system menu setup using one of the many CSS-based menuing designs possible.
Icons are terrible from a user experience stand point. A picture of a Floppy Disk doesn't un-equivocally mean SAVE. It means something to do with a Floppy Disk. A Floppy really, its 2010, SAVE on a web app means save to the server, how does a Floppy Disk even compute?
Here is an application that has had the same extremely usable interface for 10 years! And hardly any images for buttons, and it is one of the most productive applications in its category.
You know what ICONS stand for I ncomprehesible C ryptic O bfucsated N onsense S ymbol!
Also how do you internationalize an icon?