We had a new developer design a couple screens for changes in our application. He had a couple busy screens. Sure one of the screens was dictated by the customer. But the other one was a monster that he created himself.When we did a review of the design, I pointed out that there were way too many buttons on the screen. The new guy explained the use of each of the buttons. I determined it was time to step back and figure out what our goals were.
The top goal should be to make the most common operations easy for our customer. After that, the screen should be intuitive enough that you don't have to read a manual to figure it out. The design for this one new screen was not achieving any of those goals. What happened to the good old Windows user interface design principles? It might be time to get back to basics on our project.
