XA Report, Approach "User Interface"

User Interface

One of my major concerns was the design of a user-friendly interface. Luckily, Motif provides the developer with all the functions which are necessary to build powerful graphical user interfaces.

I especially concentrated my design on the following points:

style-guide conformity
One of the most disturbing mistakes in designing a user interface is to place menu items at positions which are not common with the style-guide of Motif. When writing XA I used the application Netscape as an example, followed the guidelines of Brain, Motif Programming and included standarized "hotkeys" for basic XA functions.
error savety
According to the number of selected orbital names in the Orbitals listbox of the main window the availability of menu items changes. For example, it does not make sense to print a graph if no plot has been drawn. Only menu items are selectable whose execution is currently reasonable. This improves the reliability of the software.
Additionally, errors which could not be prevented before a menu item was called, do not stop the execution of XA.
user friendliness
The online documentation offers two different approaches to get information. For the beginner, the guided tour was written to introduce him to the features of XA which he needs to create and draw pseudo orbitals. Additionally, the question-answer-system helps the user to find information in a single section for a single problem. Therefore the tedious looking up information in various sections is not necessary anymore.
For the more advanced user, who needs information about the procedures of XA, the question-answer-system might not be satisfying. Therefore a section was introduced which lists every module. This offers a source based approach instead of an problem based one.
flexibility
The resources of the XA application are stored in separate files therefore it is possible to localize the user interface, e.g. to change the label texts or the colours.

Although I spent a lot of time in designing a user-friendly interface, some inconsistencies remain. For a new user it may be disturbing when the drawing area is deleted after he has selected a menu item. This behaviour was necessary to prevent ghost plots which could not be removed previously.

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