Filed under: User Interfaces

More Options to the User - Elements of Interface Design

Featured People - Facebook

In the current UI of Facebook if you want to add a relationship you really have to do a little bit of a treasure hunt. That is unless you know exactly where it is. You have to go to Profile>Edit Profile (a grey colored button right below the Home-Profile-Account tab strip)>Featured People. There are issues with this whole mechanism. And this is just one of those things that does not make Facebook's UI "idiot proof".

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Pages, Views and Popups - Data Flows

I think i have written a few posts on popups and the issues with layer development before. Today, I was encountered with another classical situation involving Pages, views and pop-ups. And for a change i was invited to be a part of the debate. The scenario was as follows: We had a page, which was in all essence a master page dealing with the background service. This page fundamentally had a tab control with every tab's container having its own control. Now each of these controls led out to one or more popups (again effectively more controls). The issue was to treat the controls as controls and try to relinquish them of all Svc calls. Mind you at this stage no calls were being made from any of the controls but we just wanted to come up with a solution where in we could once and for all decide a standard protocol by which we could completely avert situations involving svc calls being made from the controls.

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Developing in Layers

For a long time i have been using a scheme of things in developing UIs which has started to bug me, literally in every sense of the word. What i do is this: For any page/view, i create the control, which in essence is a form or a configuration controller. Now, this control is independent from everything else, and i can use it as i deem fit. It has its own set of hooks using which i can feed and retrieve information from it. Mind you, these controls are very specific to the application itself and do not form a very integral part of a generic sdk. So, the freedom i get with these controls is absolute flexibility. I can place them in a page, a view, a pop up or a sidebar. But the only issue is that i have to play with some ground rules. Just one ground rule actually: I cannot make service calls from any of these controls. Like i discussed this in a previous post of mine in detail, doing so makes the control tightly bound with the service or the backend, hence limiting its usability in another part of the application. While this gives me a lot of freedom of where and how i want my UI to appear and look it gives me hell when i sit down to develop most of my app.

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Overlaying UI Controls/Elements

The overlaying of UI Elements or controls is something all UI Developers and Designers do. While it may be pretty useful, it can bring a lot of questions on efficiency, ease of code and logic. So, lets get down to basics: Why have overlaying or overlapping controls? Well, for one, i have been using it a lot for variable functionality. It basically means making your UI possess a different set of UI elements or controls altogether, offering radically different functionalities in varying scenarios. One in specific is having a ComboBox (drop down menu) on top of a Read-only Textbox. This can be used in a form to great effects. While the user is entering a new Form, there might be a predefined selected set of values which he might have to select from for a given field in the form. But, after saving it once, the selection should no longer be accessible and the value of the field should be permanent for the entire lifetime of the form.

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Silverlight Grid for Dummies

Being a UI designer is not enough. You should be able to render those designs somewhere. Well, i have started my journey as a UI developer and designer in the world of Silverlight. It is a fantastic framework of tools and technology. The best part being that it uses common languages like XML and C#. Well anyhow, i have been working with it for a little over two months now and i have finally recognized its most important control, the <Grid />.So i am going to give a bit of a Silverlight <Grid/> for Dummies.

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A UI FAQ

At the very outset of this post i would like to state something explicitly: I am a newbie in the world of User Interfaces and User Experience. However, i have been playing around with colours and graphics for the past 6 years now. And i have designed graphics and pondered over user experience when it has come to print media. So, if you think that i even qualify to write something like this, go ahead give it a shot, i will try not to disappoint you. The reason i have decided to put this down in simple word is because many of my friends have asked me these questions before. While i will not give you the ultimate answers, i will try and give you a direction, based on my own experiences and opinion. So here it goes - Q. What are the Rules or Axioms to be followed while designing a good User Interface?

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Elements of Interface Design 2

The prequel of this post was termed Elements of Design. It was really a feeble attempt at trying to explore the various factors of Usability in any User Interface.  I am going to continue in those lines. I am going to talk about the relation between the back-end or the service layer of any system and the system's final User Interface. In particular i am going to explore the the interdependencies between the two.

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Elements of Design

Well, now i know what it means to be busy at work. It has been a tormenting two week period to say the least. And, thankfully, (touch wood!!) I have been enjoying it. It has been a period of great exposure and learning to put it in a sentence. I have been picking up on Silverlight well, so far and look to doing so in the future. But, as usual, the real challenge has not been the technology, but the ideas, the innovations and the concepts that i have had to develop. Working as a part of an Interface Design team in a software firm is challenging. While a lot of credit goes to the platform team or dev team working on the engine, I have come to realize that it is the User Interface that people get to see and use at the end of the day. It is the logical conclusion to any platform or logic engine in the world, Period! As a part of the UI team we have to take care of a few things or aspects of design and development of a product:
  1. Usability
  2. Looks
  3. Speed/Performance

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