is it worth keeping the OS look and feel?

Question

Is it worth to try to keep your GUI within the system looks ?

Every major program have their own anyways... (visual studio, iexplorer, firefox, symantec utilities, adobe ...)

Or just the frame and dialogs should be left in the system look 'n feel range ?

update:

One easy exemple, if you want to add a close button to your tab, usually you make it against your current desktop theme. But if the user has a different theme, your close button is out of place, it doesn't fit the system look anymore.

I played with the uxtheme api, but there is nothing much you can do, and some themes i've seen are incomplete sets.

So to address this issue, the best way i see, is to do like visual studio/firefox/chrome roolup your own tab control with your theme...

Answer 1

I think, that unless your program becomes a very major part of the users life, you should strive to minimize "surprises" and maximimze recognizability (is that even a word?).

So, if you are making something that is used by 1.000 people for 10 minutes a day, go with system looks, and mechanisms.

If, on the other hand, you are making something that 100 people are using for 6 hours a day, I would start exploring what UI improvements and shortcuts I could cram in to make those 6 hours easier to deal with.

Notice however, that UI fixes must not come at the expense of performance. This is almost always the case in the beginning when someone thinks that simply overriding the OnPaint event in .Net will be sufficient.

Before you know it you are once again intercepting NC_PAINT and NC_BACKGROUNDERASE and all those little tricks to make it go as fast as the built-in controls.