Screen Layout

Good design will take common practice as its point of departure. There's a lot to be said for a fresh perspective but even the freshest perspective comes with acquired cultural and personal semiological and behavioural assumptions. Here are some recommendations.

• Screen layouts should strike a structured balance between information, interest and accessibility.
• Aim for consistency between screens and section. Changes which attract the attention of the eye should be employed for a clear purpose otherwise the user will be distracted in posing the question "why?".
• Group related elements to convenience the user by limiting eye and mouse mousements to only the most efficient.
• Don't clutter the screen with too much information. Dense is distracting!
• Don't overdo the number of font styles. As a rule of thumb, limit them to three per screen.
• Don't assume everyone understands your icons. Words, also, have a place in labelling buttons.
• Screen presentation is very influential. Avoid demonstrating work with poor screen graphics. Not everyone has the same ability to envisage how the parts will ultimately relate and appear. The bare bones may just repel!
• Navigating a program should be intuitive. Consider offering an index or plan of the program that can be conveniently accessed at any time.
• Depending on the delivery platform, a 'quit' option isn't always necessary.
• Make buttons responsive to selection. Depending on the playback system, buttons can take a nervously long time to respond to a click. If you program them to auto-highlight or change the cursor to a busy icon, say, then the user is reassured.
• Offer users a way of backing out of significant or time-consuming pathways such as quitting or printing.
• Consider whether it is better for hot-spots to activate on mousedowns or on mouseups.
• Consider whether to offer keyboard shortcuts to cursor-activated menu or screen commands.
• If the program automatically reconfigures the playback system in any way on startup, then it is only polite that, when the program is quitting, it restores the system to its original configuration.
• When programming, anticipate that users may doubleclick buttons. This may affect how buttons underlie one another as one moves from screen to screen, if this causes a problem which cannot be solved in programming.