[IxDA Discuss] Looking for Usabilty Best Practices for Windows based Application

[Scott Bower]

Microsoft has a global intranet with all the "usability" guides, 
branding manuals,
and standards if you are an approved 3d party agency. I managed the 
redo of the
style guides for 3rd party Windows Mobile application development a 
year ago
and I believe all these migrated towards that intranet. I think thin 
client and thick
client resources are there. As an FYI, it is exceptionally hard to use 
the search
tools that are part of that web based software archive. It is by no 
means an authoritative
central archive and documentation tends towards superficiality and 
inflexibility.

Microsoft has sparse internal documentation on usability best practices 
last I checked.
Documentation by other companies is also hard to find because of 
proprietary issues,
hence, the Embedded market is increasingly open source. Since you are 
designing for
the OS, you might want to try searching with that specific criteria.

When researching MSDN and other MS properties to find out why OS 
download drop
out rates were so high I found that they had done things with the code 
that made some
of their public online documentation invisible to google.... it was not 
intentional. The
backend of all their online properties is a complicated patchwork. You 
have to use
MS search tools for public info.

I would suggest poking around on Channel 9 if nobody points you to 
information
on the IxD list.
http://channel9.msdn.com/

scott
On Jul 29, 2006, at 12:58 AM, Ashish Tibrewal wrote:

> [Please voluntarily trim replies to include only relevant quoted 
> material.]
>
> Hello,
>
> In coming weeks, I would need to work over a Windows based application
> (Thick Client application) identifying the Usabiluty issues and 
> suggesting
> the changes as per the best practices. This is a financial application 
> which
> lots of forms for user inputs, grid displays, reports etc.
>
> One thing that I had noticed while comparing this appln with a web 
> based
> appln was that the action buttons like submit, reset were fixed at the 
> top
> of the form rather than having it below where the form ends.
>
> I had been to the usability guidelines published on MSDN, but I feel 
> that
> those guidelines are more related to the microsof products and not very
> general. I would like to know some pointers where I can find the 
> usability
> best practices for a Windows based application (Thick Client 
> application).
>
>
> Thanks
> Ashish
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