Hot answers tagged business-application
121
There isn't any difference between internal products and products for customers because everything is used by real people.
Sure, some executives will think that they can cut a corner here & there on design of internal products. Unfortunately, they're forgetting that a second lost here and a second lost there as a result of a poorly-designed software ...
58
You need to distinguish a good-looking, aesthetic design whose goal is to make the product easier and fun to use, from a "sexy" design whose goal is to market the product, have it featured in Smashing Magazine showcases, and have people send it to each other going Wow. The latter you don't need in an internal product, and it might do more harm than good. The ...
19
My wife is a Certified General Accountant, so I asked her about this question.
The standard accounting way is always to show negative numbers in parentheses. If you want to appeal to primarily financial professionals, that's the accepted practice.
She also cautions against using red or drawing attention to a negative number. Highlighting a number ...
14
The answer from a programmer
Yes. I have standards and want to do my job well. Asking me to cut corners compromises the work ethic, and I am not going to put as much effort in if you ask me to do it badly.
The answer from the user
Yes. I have to use this, potentially frequently. Ugly software cripples my experience. An intuitive and simplified interface ...
10
Great question. From the viewpoint of an evil rhetorician, the short answer is "build a more convincing argument." You're already asking that, so it seems what you need is techniques to improve your argument and, in turn, your persuasiveness. I've found that one of the best ways to get buy-in is to get the client to come to your own decision without feeling ...
10
There's ample evidence that "making a user interface look good" contributes significantly to the interface's usability and user experience. Kurosu & Kashimura showed the link between visual design and usabiliity way back in 1995 (PDF) and Tractinsky found the link even stronger than expected in 1997.
Since then, there's been a ton of research that shows ...
8
Without disturbing the overall pale and minimal feel that I assume you're going for - I did this quick mock-up - removing the distracting noise of horizontal lines and introducing a hint of colour into the look - also doing away with the MS System font or whatever it was. I'm sure you can do something with the message areas as well...
8
Definitely make it looks good, easy to work with, and have a fast response time, because:
People from outside the company will probably end up seeing it at some point.
You may want to commercialize the software at some stage. It's a lot more work to go back and fix UX issues after the fact than designing well in the first place.
A good UX will take more ...
7
As general rule, you should use dialog boxes only when you have to. It’s preferred that you use direct manipulation or input or edit-in-place, where the user works directly on the data objects represented in a primary window. In the case of creating objects, the edit-in-place approach has either:
An Insert button that creates the object and adds a blank ...
7
Here are some great links for you... maybe you will find what you're looking for:
http://ui-patterns.com/blog/100-sign-up-forms
http://patternry.com/p=one-page-wizard/
http://patterntap.com/tap/collection/forms
And from Lukew you can learn a lot about form design: http://www.lukew.com/ and here's a Lukew presentation: ...
7
let me ask you this:
is photoshop/3Dmax/etc.. good looking?
As designers we normally spend the entire day working within applications that allow us to do our work either faster, better or/and more conveniently. For us, this are "internal apps" because the client/customer won't see them (usually).
The same goes when developing UI and UX for different ...
7
If you get in the habit of making ugly cumbersome software for internal use, you run the risk of using the same bad practices when working on external products. This is especially likely to be a problem for anyone who starts on internal products when first hired because their initial exposure to corporate culture will be the sloppy form.
7
In general, yes, but there are a number of other variables here that may impact how much effort you put into it.
Who is the audience?
If it's "just a couple of engineers," quick-n-dirty may be just fine, and in fact preferable. Get it done and move on. If it's for more than a couple people, or for people in different groups, then spend a little more time ...
6
No, No, No, No, No, No, No. You should always use the culture settings of the region your app is running into.
Locale specific representation is the way to go. In Europe 1 mill is 1.000.000,00 not 1,000,000.00.
They also may use a different standard for negative numbers. Also there's subtle differences between US/Canada. It's way simpler to just pull the ...
6
I'm a bit distressed that people living in a world exposed to things like Google Instant and StackExchange sites could possibly still be making interfaces like the other suggestions. :-/
It seems like when programmers design user interface, they get horse blinders on and recast the goal as making sure the UI can't get into an "invalid" state in the data. ...
5
It sounds like this is an application where the user seriously needs to know when an operation goes through. In this case you can not get away with hiding the function or hiding the error message as others have suggested.
From your description, I am inferring that these are admin or otherwise trusted users that are knowledgeable about what they are doing ...
5
The problem with adding images, animations attitude could probably be well illustrated by a comparison between StackOverflow website and OSQA project default UI. Both are quite simple and use few images or animations, and yet the difference is obvious (not in OSQA's favor[0]).
Good UI doesn't mean going fancy and using animation, but caring about things ...
5
When designing an interface, you should focus on making it as easy to use as you can, not on doing something new for the sake of it. And as your question stands you haven't really shown what the problem with checkboxes is that you are going to solve with icons and colours.
So breaking it down with specific reasons:
Checkboxes clearly indicate their state ...
4
Could you create a vertical tab interface, with each tab representing an effective date? Click on a tab to see the data as of that effective date. (Think Apple's Time Machine without the fancy animation.)
To make a change, the user would start with entering an effective date. That would create and select a new tab, a copy of of the one that preceded it, ...
4
The absolute best way that I've found to convince folk is to just go and do it for a bit - and report on the results.
Find a team in your organisation and just try it. If you can't find a team find a couple of interested co-workers and just try it. Track what works and what doesn't. Figure out where it's saving you time and the organisation money.
After ...
4
Yes, you do - simply because attractive interfaces work better. Lots of links and reading material can be found in this great article on uxmyths.com: Myth #25: Aesthetics are not important if you have good usability
4
As a person who has worked in a call center (which is privy to beta testing of internal programs) I will say this; Programs reflect on the care of the company itself and directly affects employee morale.
Its not that the program will not work the same with or without a nice logo and non-pixelated GUI. However it tells a message that you the company cares ...
4
As Ben said, UX patterns aren't sacred and they exist for specific scenarios.
Avoiding multi-columns is meant to prevent confusion in the path to completion (people zigzagging), in situations like this one:
download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups
In your case you already have strong vertical edges which guide the user, ...
4
There is no screen resolution that you can think of as a norm for "business environments" as the norm varies greatly from business to business.
For example, most graphic design businesses have resolutions of at least 1920x1200, while many general admin environments may still be using 1024x768.
You need to find out what your prospective customers use as ...
4
What you are really asking is what is the benefit and risk of progressive disclosure in a web form design.
Benefits
The benefit of using progressive disclosure is that you lower the user's cognitive load by only showing the fields they need to complete their task. As they enter more data, more fields may be required, but they only have to examine and ...
3
I'd say one of the better ones for application design is About Face 3. A lot of it spends time on interaction design for desktop apps, as opposed to the web (at least in version 2). You can't go wrong with Alan Cooper's work.
3
You may want to look at Nielsen intranet reports:
http://www.nngroup.com/reports/intranet/
Altough they are kind of expensive, there are lots of good ideas. Some managers are more easily convinced, if you show them, that "Acme Co." does the same.
Also if your organization is spread geographicaly, an other factor is the the less travel cost (because of ...
3
Perhaps you could sell in the idea of efficiency.
Example: You can use twitter like status report for project teams and business groups as a way of:
checking availability for impromptu meetings, i.e. what's jill up to. is she free now.
checking where people are in case you have a questions about a project i.e. Bill is in a meeting, what's jack up to i ...
3
Perhaps they need to be reminded that it is far better to present employees with the option to contribute to an internal knowledgebase over updating Facebook statuses when they should be working...
Identify pain points (failed interdepartmental initiatives, office supply consumption for internal reports, lack of central repository for meeting notes) and ...
3
It's hard to get around asking the user for an effective date for each change if they have to give a specific effective date for each change. There are some opportunities, though. Do some research into how people are using your software and see if you can figure out some patterns. For example, perhaps users are managing accounts, and accounts are always ...
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