We all struggle when it comes to user interface design. There is a tendency that brilliant ideas when compared with gray matter dissolve into something like this. I bet that you all seen (done) something similar. Well, let’s face the truth, unless you are making another search engine, FPP shooter or tic-tac-toe game you are probably building another enterprise app, and they are called enterprise because they tend to swallow a lot of data (over generalization was intended ;-). And yes, that data should be entered in them somehow, usually by human beings sitting in front of a computer. So we don’t have an option to run away from creating TextBoxes, ComboBoxes, Grids etc.
I have to admit that recently I was lost in pursuit of perfect input form design. In order to reduce overwhelming amount of user controls I decided to leverage some features of data grids. My reasoning was quite simple – if I need to show data in a grid, maybe I can enter it using the same control. To straight things up here, I’m writing ERP-like system that is using WPF as a view layer. I’m using 3rd party data grid control that is really powerful, so I had all the means. Anyway, at first it seemed like a great idea, but after a while whole lot of challenges appeared. First, if you don’t have a source code to really complex control, and you want use something extraordinary sooner or later you will run into problems. Even with XAML great templating capabilities. Other issues showed up when the number of fields to display arose – it made scrolling and grouping really useless. Eventually I gave up and decided that grids are great for displaying concise pieces of data. Lesson learned.
If you are new to WPF and want to see it’s power I suggest to see this dnrTv video. It shows how boring forms can become something like an art yet having a lot more of usability and productivity. It’s a lot more than fancy flash sites, where everything is pretty, but damn hard to use.
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WPF,
user interface