IBM i General Design Standards › Design Standards for User Interfaces

Design Standards for User Interfaces

There are some general principles for designing user interfaces that you should be familiar with.

User interface is a general term used to describe those aspects of a computer system which are visible to the user, and with which the user interacts when using the system. To describe it, you need to consider both the static components, such as keyboard layouts, panel and report designs, and the dynamic components, such as how programs should respond to the user's actions.

IBM’s Common User Access (CUA) sets out detailed rules for the appearance and behavior of user interfaces both for programmable and non-programmable terminals (NPT). The following sections summarize some of the design principles behind CUA, as well as some specific rules for applying the principles to NPTs on iSeries.