UserInterface Design Guidelines
See
Year2009 February22 - Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight
- The Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight is designed to help you more easily build enterprise-level Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) client applications. This guidance will help you design and build flexible composite client applications-composite applications use loosely coupled, independently evolvable pieces that work together in the overall application.
iPhone - broken
When should we violate standards?:
The answer to this question is simple, but difficult: We should violate standards whenever we have a darn good reason to.Of course, this begs the question: What makes a darn good reason? Personal preference is out, including those of your client or user-test subjects. I'd like to answer "when a new idiom is measurably better," but I am deeply suspicious of the objectivity of contemporary "measurement" approaches. The real answer is the de facto answer: when the idiom can be seen to be manifestly better, go ahead and use it. This is how the toolbar came into existence, along with buttcons, outlines, tabbed dialogs, and many other idioms. Scientists and academics may have been examining these artifacts in their labs, but it was their presence in real-world software that showed the way. Your reason may ultimately prove to not be darn good and your product will suffer -- possibly die -- but designers will learn from its lack of merit. This is what ChristopherAlexander, in NotesOnTheSynthesisOfForm (Harvard University Press, 1964), calls the "UnselfconsciousProcess," an indigenous and unexamined process of slow and tiny forward increments as individuals attempt to improve solutions. Like art.
--499~501, AboutFace
See also