Summary

Having looked in Chapter 13 at how you can organize forms based on the tasks users perform, in this chapter we've examined how to structure the controls on the forms, based on the structure of the entities they display.

The choices you make in structuring your forms will be determined primarily by the entities that are to be represented on the form and—if more than one entity is represented—how the entities are related. Secondarily, the form's structure will be determined by the number of attributes to be displayed, since best practice dictates that no more than 25 to 30 controls or control groups should be visible on a form at one time.

In the next chapter, we'll move to the next level of user interface design: choosing individual controls to represent different kinds of data.