mangoed

Hi, this is my first post so if it is to the wrong forum or something then please point me in the correct direction.
????: NamePros.com http://www.namepros.com/web-design-discussion/39818-web-interface-design-opinions-sought.html

I've been a professional web-developer for some years, contracting through my own company. I'm nearing the end of an ASP.NET project for a client (who is, in fact, a go between for another company but they are my point of contact) and am being forced to change a number of design decisions that I made during the course of the project. Needless to say, I don't want to do this (who does) but I need a little more ammunition to argue for my way of doing things as opposed to theirs. Specifically, I don't just need opinion, however informed (I can provide that myself, possibly), but any links to published reputable information which supports my perspective and contradicts theirs (or, sigh, even vice versa) would be welcome.

What *they* want:

1) Lots of double-clicking. Now this seems to me an accessibility nightmare and to contradict user expectations of how a web-based UI generally functions. Also, ASP.NET controls don't seem to support it because, well, it just isn't done, is it?

In general, I'm using a list of items in a table each with a radio button. This allows each to be individually selected, the radio button being an 'affordance' for selection, the whatever action is necessary can be instigated with a normal command button. Even single-clicking anywhere on the row to select an item doesn't seem quite right to me - but maybe that's just me!

2) Lots of pop-ups. Well, I'm trying to keep these to a minimum but sometimes it just isn't possible to do without. However, I've been told to implement a pop-up which is launched by a button on screen A. Okay, fine if the information displayed or entered in the pop-up has anything to do with screen A but it doesn't. What happens is that screen A launches the pop-up, the pop-up needs (after some data entry) to postback to the server, then it passes information received from the server back to screen A which does nothing itself with the data but pass it to screen B which uses it. (Screens A and B are always the same page.)

I really hate this idea of using a pop-up which has no relation to the page which launched it. Why not just reimplement it as a gateway page between the two - where it makes sense?

3) I have several tables, a column of which is hyperlinked in order to navigate to a particular page when clicked. Again. to me this implies an affordance for navigation (say a list of addresses which are hyperlinks to address-specific pages). I've been told to get rid of the links and just do a JavaScript onclick navigation when the user clicks the row. Is this really better?

4) I want to use a date-picker (in fact, an ASP.NET calendar control), they want a free text field. Surely a means of input which removes the possibility of user error is a bonus. This is aside from my incipient nightmare of parsing culture-specific free form dates! Now, I'm not saying this is the end of the world but it still seems nonsensical. Surely everyone knows how to use a calendar, or maybe not.

5) They want to enable/disable the submit button on each form dependent on whether is has been completed or not. It is very difficult to tell when a form has been completed - in this case it is going to require server-based validation anyway. In fact, one of the overriding goals of the project is entirely separating UI from business logic. Data validation is actually being performed on the middle-tier via a web service (I'm not too keen on this either but I can't object to everything). Aside from whether enabling/disabling a submit button is really a good idea (giving the user no feedback as to why the button is currently disabled), doesn't incorporating knowledge of the validation criteria necessary to enable the button destroy the point of seperating it from the UI (by, in reality, embedding it in the UI)? Surely much better to keep the button enabled and to present some helpful messages when all doesn't go well.

Anyway, that's about it for now. Anyone got an constructive opinons or sources of information which might aid me in my fight?

????: NamePros.com http://www.namepros.com/showthread.php?t=39818
-dan

Anthony

This may help:
Why Pop-ups Are Bad!
http://www.apromotionguide.com/whypopups.html