Further thoughts on GUI design

[S J Martin]

I notice that the GUI aspect, though accounting for only 10% of the final score, is a common area for people to lose marks.

I hope it's not bad form to speculate on what the examiners might be looking for .... (no doubt a friendly mod will sort me out if that's the case).

NB: I'm in the early stages of SCJD, so have no experience of the essay, or personal validation of my work.

So here's my list of my GUI priorities (in no particular order):

1. Clear screen layout, alignment, use of widgets.
2. Conformance to Sun GUI guidelines As per this document.
3. Proper use of the TableModel, though even better, implementation of the MVC Architecture
4. Usability - perhaps docking points for some features not being available (e.g. column sorting, record update, record delete ???), or (more likely ???) docking points along the lines of the following:

-1 point for every mouse click required after client start until the full set of records is displayed.

-1 point for every mouse click to close the program (ignoring first selection of the "exit" command).

Similar to above for "Search" command.

Loss of N points for not being able to book a record from a table double click ???

Loss of N points for not being able to use keyboard short-cuts for major features (from a list they have).

Loss of N points for not being able to tab between input fields.

Loss of N points for not providing feedback for long operations (perhaps they lock a record via direct interface access and then attempt updates/delete via your GUI.

There must be many others, thoughts please.

I do believe that the points deduction is very specific, with little room for individual examiner subjectivity.

I'm also wondering about menus. From reading KS&BB it sounds like a menu is pretty much expected (lost points lost if not provided) and that menu must comply with standards ("File", "Edit" and "View", etc), with menu entries for "Open" and "Close". But we only have one implicit database (the fact that it is a file being no concern of the client GUI), so the "File" menu is irrelevant (actually, the Sun guidelines on this are far less stringent than KS&BB led me to believe so I'm not so worried about the exact menu contents).

[Mark Ebeling]

S J,
I have to say is you have done a great job evaluating the requirements. I am doing the GUI right now for the B&S project, and I appreciate your ideas and links. Looks like I have some reading to do just to catch up.

Thanks,

[Sanjeev Singh]

Dear SJ,
Good points made.I am about to start my assignment but got an idea for doing the requirement analysis.So before one starts doing the actual coding they must be gone through such considerations in requirement analysis.

[rinke hoekstra]

Good overview.

Points you did not mention explicitly:

* the form should behave well when changing the screen resolution (not becoming a mess)

* Probably you should test it out at least on both linux and windows.

Rinke

[S J Martin]

Originally posted by rinke hoekstra:
Points you did not mention explicitly:
* the form should behave well when changing the screen resolution (not becoming a mess)
* Probably you should test it out at least on both linux and windows.

Ooooh, nice :-)
Thanks for that.

Snap on the SCJP score - bit annoying to have dropped those 6 questions though :-(