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We are implementing a Windows 7 application that displays a pop-up in the taskbar's notification area.

There are two version of the simple form.

v1

and the compact version:

v2

Which one is closer to Windows's UI guidelines? Is there a good reason to prefer one over the other?

Cody Gray - on strike
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Evgenyt
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  • Not sure why people are voting to close this. You *could* interpret this as a subjective question, but it isn't one. The question is actually about conformity with standard platform UI/UX guidelines, which is totally reasonable. In fact, thanks for caring about these things; far too many developers don't and produce crappy applications as a result. – Cody Gray - on strike Dec 18 '11 at 09:44
  • Nitpick: there's no such thing as a "system tray". It's called the taskbar notification area. It's always been called that. People just decided that it must be the "systray" (and therefore "system tray") because there was an application in the Windows 95 Task Manager called `systray.exe`. – Cody Gray - on strike Dec 18 '11 at 09:45

1 Answers1

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The second one looks better to me. It's hard to put my finger on the exact difference between them, but it looks like there's more horizontal padding between the borders on the first one.

That's not consistent with the standard UI or the sample pictures in Microsoft's handy UI documentation/guidebook.

For example, there's very little horizontal (or vertical) padding in these two notification area pop-ups:

                                 

The standard border padding for windows (according to Microsoft's UX guidelines) is 7 DLUs (about 12 pixels) all the way around. When in doubt, I suggest using that.

Beyond the UI/UX guidelines, it's also important to consider functionality. A pop-up window should not take up the entire screen, so using space as parsimoniously as possible is always a good idea. Since the extra padding doesn't really add anything to or make your dialog more usable, it's superfluous.

Cody Gray - on strike
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