Business Application UI Design [closed]

Question

Basically I'm going to go a bit broad here and ask a few questions to get a bit of a picture of how people are handling UI these days.

Lately I've found it pretty easy to do some fancy things with UI design and with WPF specifically we're finding new ways to do layouts that are better looking and more functional for the user, but in contrast one of the business focused guys at our local .NET User Group wouldn't even think of using WPF until it had a datagrid that he could use to make Excel like input forms.

1. So basically, have you rethought the design of your business apps as you move to Web/WPF/Silverlight designs, because for us at least - in winforms we kept things fairly functional and uniform, or are you trying to keep that "known" UI?

2. Would a dedicated design guy (for larger teams), or a dev with more design chops rank higher when looking at hiring these days? (Check out what a designer did for Scott Hanselman's BabySmash and Microsoft's Prism demo)

3. Are there any design hints/tips/guidelines you use for your UI - especially for WPF?

4. What sites would you recommend for design?

Answer 1

I recommend that you read Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think first. The book has a great checklist of things that you have to take into consideration when designing your UIs. While it's focused on web usability, a lot of the lessons therein are valuable even to desktop application designers.

That being said, whether you use Windows forms or WPF or Flash or whatever new and shiny thing that comes around is, it is of utmost importance to hire either a) a real designer, or b) a development guy with a lot of UI design experience, either of which who can provide you a serious URL for their design portfolio. It will help a lot not only in improving the design of your application but also unburdening your developers from thinking about UI design, and allow them to focus on the back-end code.

As for "business focused" guys -- it would be really great if you would get the opinion of actual customers and stake holders, and have them do some usability testing for your application. It's their opinion that would matter most.

I think it would not be difficult to get a good designer up to speed on Microsoft Expression Blend to whip up some good XAML designs that your team could use to come up with a really good product.

Answer 2

Here's a great screen cast where Billy Hollis goes into many of these issues:

http://www.dnrtv.com/default.aspx?showNum=115