Well, almost... I had a super-super urgent report which had to be set up for South Lanarkshire before 11am and David had a meeting at Enfield in the afternoon. Other distractions included a user locked out from Lewisham and some woman trying to sell me advertising space over the phone. All resolved satisfactorily then we got on with the main purpose of our meeting...
We have decided to modernise the user interface, bring it into line with Office 2007 and generally make it pleasing to the eye. A lot of trial and error and informal voting - "I quite like that..." , "I definitely dont like that" and unhelpful comments like "How do Microsoft decide on the look and feel of their products?" - "pay a graphic designer a fortune to play around with shapes and colours, and not write a line of code" was the cynical answer.
Well, it is definitely time to change the wallpaper. 18 months ago we introduced the new visually appealing Buttons, with a rollover hierarchy, but we never changed the background or thought about the impact on the eye of bold colours and numerous hyperlinks.
This is not a quick project, and while we consider ourselves to be software experts, we would not pretend to be graphic designers. Unfortunately we suspect, our customers - the readers of this blog - will want their system to be visually pleasing, and won't want to pay the premium for an art expert. Seems like a good use for a Blog, to invite opinion as the project unfolds. As a reader, this is your chance to have an impact on our thinking and on the system.
We started with the Case History, surely the central screen in the whole system. We have adopted the Office 2007 colour scheme, we have replaced the hyperlinks with icons, we have introduced roll-over highlighting. Outstanding items, get a red flag if they are overdue, and orange flag if they are pending.
What do you think? There is a "Comments" button at the end of this blog. The next blog episode will be the main data display page - what we call View Details.
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