Part IV: Advanced Programming

Chapter 14. Interface Design

The primary purpose of this book is to provide a set of standards for writing professional and maintainable code. As I've repeatedly stressed, well-written code usually performs better than poorly written code and is almost always easier to maintain. But regardless of how wonderful and productive your code is, users typically interact with your application's interface, not its code. Many books deal with the intricacies of interface design, and many are quite good, including About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design (John Wiley & Sons, 1995), Developing User Interfaces for Microsoft Windows (Microsoft Press, 1999), and The Windows Interface Guidelines for Software Design (Microsoft Press, 1995). These books don't just teach how to create good interfaces; they also get into theories of what makes a good interface and why.

This chapter and Chapter 15, "User Input and Notification," focus on the interface of a program and the interaction between the interface and the user. This chapter concentrates on the interface itself, and the next chapter deals with user interaction. Of course, one chapter can't completely cover the subject of designing interfaces with Microsoft Visual Basic .NET. Instead, this chapter is meant to give you specific, practical information on creating better interfaces. Its directives and practical applications address some of the more common interface mistakes and will help you build tighter and more intuitive interfaces.