Program Design / Layout
 

Just looking for views on this design.

This design is that of the software I posted here to be tested, I didnt want to flood the forums with my project all at once so I hesitated to post these images.

My other thread has slowed down now so here we go.

Thanks for your opinions.

John Wesley.

Looks kind of "boxy"... ? But overall pretty good...
Is there a reason for the shapes in the top right corners of the section content in Settings.JPG?

The shapes in the top right corner of each group are buttons, initially all groups are disabled and should be enabled with this button.
The reason being so that your only using one option at a time.

Looks like a clean UI design. Better than some commercial software i have seen in my [very short] time. Its a bit over kill on the use of frames/boxes, and the colour of the background, buttons etc is maybe a tad strange, but its better than having great big blue buttons randomly put on a form. Im still having nightmares about linxis program he submitted recently. Yours by comparision is at least 10 times more pleasing on the eye and definatly more user friendly.

JimmyJim : In your opinion should I Lose the boxes?

Imo you should drop the boxes around the buttons.
Btw a nice and clean design.

John i think that you should cut down on the boxes, maby have a few on a form to divide up the settings or groups of buttons. But having a box in a box is too much i think, just like in settings. In mixedfrms having a box just for a picture is again maybe too much.

In my form design i might have a box to contain a group of related controls, such as the num pad in your authorisation picture. I would not normally just put controls in a box just for the shear fun of it. Its a balance, maybe you should remove some of the boxes and then post some more screen shots. Its still looks nice, just the use of too many boxes has not added much in terms of useablility.

Thanks JJ, I will play with it tonight, removing some of the boxes and post images of the changes. this can only take place after some coding later tonight though (first things first :P) and I probably wont be able to post them until monday.

@Authorization : You mispelled the word in the title bar. I would try reversing the number pad with the password field and information. I think people are most used to seeing it as far right as possible.

@Settings : If you make all of the boxes the same widths, it will look much more organized. Your "show screen" box doesn't extend the same width as "display message". And your "change password" box doesn't extend the same width as "emergency file".

That said, you should remove the "visual settings" box, to make it consistent. Since the right column has no outer box.

Then make sure all of the boxes have equal margins between each neighbouring box, and the window's border. There are unequal seperating distances around each box. Going one step further, make the "save" and "close" buttons have the same margin too. To do that, just bump it right until it's the same distance from the bottom as it is from the right.

And finally, you may want to stretch the window about 20 x 20, so you can add inner padding to all of the boxes. People's eyes automatically turn away from font that is touching, or nearing a border. Adding inner padding will solve that.

@Time Limit & Password Invalid : The "emergency file detected" window is a perfect example of uniform sizing, that these two windows should take after. The boxes are different heights, as opposed to the clean uniform heights that "emergency file detected" has. Just make the windows taller, and stretch out the height of the text area to match that of the image's height.

If you don't understand what I meant about similar margins for the "save" and "close" buttons in the "settings" windows, all of your buttons have that in these three windows; they all have equal distances to the borders.

... I love design. :D

Sane, thanks for taking the time to bring these matters to my attention. It's not until someone mentions that you think " ahhhh...how simple am I?"
From your post I get the impression that the settings form is the worst, and needs most work done, although its really just about chopping and changing unless someone has a justified opinion that it all needs overhauled :\.

Time to go ask myself some serious questions, like "why did I think leaving two buttons 1/2 inch away from the forms border was reasonable thing to do?".