#Ui browser vs windows

Then, the layout should still reflect a web page more than an app in most circumstances, but the controls should probably mimic a desktop application to help people transition. It can be done, but they are not the same thing, and should not be treated as such under almost any circumstance.Ī partial exception is when the web app duplicates the function of a desktop app (ie, Google docs). which is fitting a round peg into a square hole. Links are also quite small and comparatively difficult to click for repeated actions, and for me reek of incomplete design/coding when used extensively.Ī lot of web apps that I've seen that have generally failed try to duplicate a desktop app in a browser window. Most people will actively ignore blue, underlined text when they want to do something, because they're used to a 'submit form' button, or something similar.

Links are for moving in websites, buttons do things. Make it a control, or an image, or something. Unless you're actually 'linking' to a separate page, do not make it look like a link. Imagine reading this reply without any spaces, new lines, or bullets.Ī pet peeve of mine are text links that perform frequent actions. It helps separate information, and makes it easier to process. This is part of the reason why a lot of web pages are fixed-width, and favor columns over rows. Stick to something similar to what books have they've been refined for centuries.

Columns of text shouldn't be super-wide, because the wider a line gets, the harder it is to jump to the next line to continue reading.

It may seem like you're just copying the big players, but consistency is much more important than it immediately seems. When you make a web app, it should reflect this habit, because you will otherwise jar people's brains through wildly different layouts if they're switching between web pages and your app (and you know that some will).

A lot of what people use a web browser for is reading.

Sometimes they're inescapable, but you should almost never constrain your app to only the visible size of the browser window. More loads are always slower, and cause feelings of discontinuity. yes, there's a cache, but it's not as fast as not loading a single page). Information is typically portrayed in one 'window', as splitting it up would require both separate page loads, and re-loading identical data (styles, menus, etc.

The scroll bar is no longer a bad thing in fact, using a scroll bar anywhere where the main one could be used is usually considered bad form (with a few exceptions, of course). A web app, on the other hand, has essentially infinite vertical height, as most people are used to scrolling in their web browser.

#Ui browser vs windows

Where more space is needed, the information is generally split into either new windows or sub-window panes/tabs. A desktop app tends to be built for a minimum height & width resolution (often 800*600), and tries as hard as it can to fit all the relevant information into a size smaller than that, because scroll bars are generally very bad practice for non-tabular/list data.A big design difference that a lot of people overlook is the structure of the window itself.