This post originated from an RSS feed registered with .NET Buzz by Peter van Ooijen. Original Post: ASP.net applications : a rich user experince for mort-al users Feed Title: Peter's Gekko Feed URL: /error.htm?aspxerrorpath=/blogs/peter.van.ooijen/rss.aspx Feed Description: My weblog cotains tips tricks and opinions on ASP.NET, tablet PC's and tech in general. Latest .NET Buzz Posts Latest .NET Buzz Posts by Peter van Ooijen Latest Posts From Peter's Gekko

I was struck by a post Make it as rich as possible by simplegeek Chris'An where he complains about the limitations of "normal" web apps and raves about the possibilities AJAX will bring to browser apps. When talking about morts Rocky Lhotka mentions VB6 as their development environment of choice to build rich Windows applications. Both very good stories but I want to be the devils advocate and talk a little about some experiences I had with one of my clients. Over the years I had been building Delphi Win32 apps for them with all bells and whistles. For a new project, which would involve very frequent roll-outs (it took an administrator to install a Windows app on XP), we decided to go for an asp.net intranet app. Which was a great success. Also when it came to user experience.

Some lessons learned:

Most users are plain Mort-als

• Have to work with a small screen, close to the window, a crappy mouse and a rattling keyboard.
• Floating toolbars will drift away and get lost. It takes a call to support to recover them.
• The screen should list plain information. No frills, no more. Coming back from lunch the screen's content should be just the same.
• Printout's are filed , they have to look good.
• A user with some geek-iness will want to do his work in Excel anyhow

In contrast most blog-reading developers like you and me (a minority as Rocky explains) are utter geeks:

• They boast about their screen real-estate, desire a perfect working environment, have several mice and related devices and can't live without their natural pro typing gadget.
• The diversity of controls available in the toolbox can't be big enough.
• Can't get enough of textboxes with 3-d reflection
• Reporting tools are best suited as something to complain about

That's quite a contrast.

As a practical tip are some of my experiences in building asp.net applications which satisfy my mortal users

• Use a common stylesheet for every page. To adjust the pages to available screen real-estate the sa updates the sheet. The VS2005 support for themes, skins and the like is great, VS 2003 needs some fiddling.
• Use flow layout (default in VS2005)
• Give your controls a relative size. A grid with a width of 100% will fully utilize every screen size. In case the user has a large screen she can increase the browser text size. In case she has a small screen the columns in the table will wrap
• Make extensive use of hyperlinks. Drill-down by clicking the link. Don't cram everything on one page
• Use a reporting tool which is friendly to the sa. Crystal is not. Reporting Services is.
• Most reporting tools have a lot of export capabilities in the box. Make sure these are just a click away.

Don't get me wrong, I personally love rich and interesting UI's. To satisfy my needs i have my Tablet PC to play with. But to pay my mort-gage, kids and car I do depend on plain asp.net.