Understanding the Role of UI Standards
Applications must also strive to adhere to any relevant standards associated with their look and feel. Some standards are documented for you by the platform “owner.” Microsoft, for example, has a set of UI design guidelines documented within MSDN. The book Microsoft Windows User Experience, published by Microsoft Press, is included in its entirety within MSDN. By tackling topics such as data-centered design, input basics, and design of graphic images, this book provides a structured baseline of UI design collateral for Windows application developers.
Design guidelines and UI standards are often specific to a given platform. The current look and feel expected from a Windows application trace primarily back to the “new” design that debuted with Windows 95. Windows XP further refined those expectations. Windows Vista and Windows 7 offered a new set of design principals and now, Windows 8 and Windows 10 offer up the most radical set of changes in recent history with their focus on the touch experience and Modern UI/Windows Store-style applications.
Visual Studio surfaces some of these design guidelines and standards to make it easy to develop conforming interfaces. For instance, default button heights match the recommended standard, and Visual Studio assists developers with standard control positioning relative to neighboring controls by displaying snaplines as you move controls on the form surface. We cover this topic more fully later in this chapter.
De Facto Standards
Sometimes the influence of a particular application or suite of applications is felt heavily in the UI design realm. One example here is Microsoft Outlook. Various applications now in the wild mimic, for instance, the structure and layout of Microsoft Outlook even though they are not, per se, email applications. The Microsoft Outlook designers struck a vein of usability when they designed its primary form, and now other companies and developers have leveraged those themes in their own applications. A similar comment can be made about the appearance of the “ribbon” toolbar that debuted with Microsoft Office 2007.
Although there are limits, Visual Studio enables developers to achieve the same high-fidelity UIs used in Microsoft Office and other popular applications. In fact, if you look at the official Windows Forms website, you see demo applications written with Visual Studio showcasing how you can develop replicas of the Microsoft Outlook, Quicken, or even Microsoft Money facades. (Visit the Downloads page at http://www.windowsclient.net.)