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Creating a simple and user-friendly interface


What is simplicity? That is the property of being effortless, clean and easy to understand. It is not unexpected then that simplicity is often thrived for in user interface design. Most people intuitively dislike complexity in hardware and applications. Yes, a few individuals like figuring out how something works, however for the major population, being unable to correctly use an interface causes wasted time and disappointment, and that's not what we are to achieve. If you are able to take a complex device or a piece of software and by some means [rearrange, reorganize and redesign] the GUI to make it easy to use and understand, then you're right on the path to delivering a better user satisfaction. One of the options you can use in your GUI design is Context based controls. There are a few of approaches you can use in interface design that relate to context and unity. One dictates that you should keep key elements similar throughout your applications or web portal to be sure that people know where everything is and don't get confused. The second approach is to change controls or navigation according to the context of each page or window. The context based approach is when you show only the stuff the user needs to finish the process they're working in that particular context. A good illustration of the two attitudes can be found in the revision of the Microsoft Office GUI. Office 2003, along with its older siblings, followed the design principle of leaving the controls unchanged. There was a bunch of toolbars shown in the window at all times, and these didn't change whether you were working with columns, graphics, text or pictures. Microsoft remodeled this interface in the release of Office 2007 applying a context based approach. At the top you now see a toolbar - or a number of buttons. When selected, each tab displays a pack of controls relevant to any specific task, be it spell checking, processing graphics, or simply writing. The content related approach allows you to show fewer controls at any single time point, but at the same time, more controls that are critical to the task at hand. I wouldn't advice choosing a context-heavy approach for general web design because for most webpages people want to see constant site-wide navigation. This is because every website is different, and it would make the browsing experience much harder if all the individual pages on a particular site were different too. Having said this, this can be utilized for web applications because they're not just simple websites - they're pieces of software that live in the cloud. People are likely to spend a lot of time on a web app and will have more opportunity to learn how it works. The complexity of some web apps means that you really need to utilize the context based approach, because if you don't, there will be too much on the screen at any given time for anyone to process. By showing only a few relevant controls for a given task, your users can figure out what to do in much less time.



 Standard Toolbar Icons

Standard Toolbar Icons

 Science Toolbar Icons

Science Toolbar Icons


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