Designing Screens › Principles of Screen Design

Principles of Screen Design

During screen design, you arrange the fields that implement import and export data views and specify explanatory text to support them. An understanding of the user's environment and a set of meaningful standards help to produce good screen designs.

The following list shows critical principles for user-oriented screen design:

• Adopt the user's perspective—The user has to perform a certain task, and the interface has to support this task as closely as possible.

  Different user roles have different requirements. For instance, the frequent user of a system tends to want the greatest amount of information possible on the screen, commands and function keys to streamline navigation, minimal descriptive and help text, and minimal interruption.

  The infrequent user of a system tends to need descriptive headings and labels, longer messages, a low volume of data per screen, and comprehensive help facilities.

  Keep the interface natural. The navigation should feel right to the user.

  Give the user control. The user should be able to go on, cancel or switch to another part of the application.

  Maintain consistency throughout the application. The user will always know what to expect.

• Design for frequent use—Place the most frequently used fields where the user will see them first.
• Take account of physical documents—Arrange fields on data entry screens to closely resemble any corresponding planned or current source document. In the case of a planned document, the document and the layout designs may influence each other.
• Take account of workflow within the layout—Arrange fields in the layout, and in any new document designs, according to the sequence in which users access the information.

  Segregate data functionally. All the information the user needs to complete a particular activity should be on one display.

• Group related objects together—Do not leave large spaces between unrelated objects; this forces the user's eye to travel too far.
• Keep the layout simple—A cluttered and busy display distracts from the task at hand. Balance this against the inconvenience of users having to go through multiple displays to complete a user task.

  Arrange fields on a screen in priority sequence, top-to-bottom, left-to-right. Linguistic differences may change this priority sequence.

  Set standards for colors, highlighting, and general format. This ensures that the look and feel of all components of the system is the same.

By the time screen design is finalized, you should already have defined the data views of the procedure steps involved.

More information:

Designing the System Structure

Preparing for Design