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I'm making a small business application and I'm wondering what the best interface would be. The application itself is your run-of-the-mill service ticket tracker. There will be forms for searching tickets (with a grid for results), creating a new ticked & viewing an existing ticket, managing some administrative stuff (users, a few classifiers, etc.), inventory management forms...

So what would be the best interface? Initially I thought about MDI (because that's easy to do in .NET), but then I got my hands on Telerik RAD controls and TDI (Tabbed Document Interface) is now easy to do too (and I'm a fan of TDI since I'm a programmer and most IDEs successfully use that). And while searching for similar questions on SO I found some advice that said that TDI and MDI are both clumsy, and you should do an SDI (a separate taskbar window for each open form).

So... what would be the best here?

Vilx-
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  • Honestly, your best bet is to do a full Ux survey against the target market to see what is the most effective and efficient method. – Michael Todd Feb 17 '10 at 23:48
  • Have you considered doing a browser based interface with a web backend? – Greg Hewgill Feb 17 '10 at 23:49
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    I'm doing so many web programming every day that I relish the chance to do a windows app for a change. :) And I do think that windows apps are superior when it comes to usability. – Vilx- Feb 17 '10 at 23:53

2 Answers2

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I must second Michael Todd's suggestion (and the usual Nielsen/Joel Sposky mantra).

Do user testing

Mock up one and the other. Show to a couple of "representative" target users.

Ask them to workflow through each and describe which feels more natural/intuitive/easy.

Also, this may be a naive advice (I have zero Windows coding experience) but couldn't you code something generic/flexible enough to be able to work in both TDI and non-TDI formats?

(think Firefox "New Tab" vs "New Window" as an obvious example)

DVK
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  • Wow, I can't believe that I didn't get this idea myself. Make it configurable! Thanks! :) – Vilx- Feb 18 '10 at 09:29
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I prefer TDI to a cluttered taskbar. Works well for me, but the HCI usability gods may not agree. Browsers and IDEs seem to have converged on TDI too.

spender
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  • I think that most developers will prefer TDI, however I doubt that the same thing can be said for simple users. – Vilx- Feb 17 '10 at 23:51
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    With browsers probably being the most common software used by "simple users", I beg to differ. – spender Feb 17 '10 at 23:53
  • And what percentage of them are actually using more than one tab? And how many of them like it? I don't know, this is all just a speculation... – Vilx- Feb 17 '10 at 23:57