Visual Design Guidelines
Visual Design Guidelines |
Overview of visual design guidelines.
This section promotes the visual and functional consistency of the Microsoft® Windows® operating system and provides guidelines to make your application more effective on Tablet PC. Although Microsoft encourages you to follow all of these guidelines, you can adopt only the guidelines that best suit your application. The more closely you follow these guidelines, the better users of your application can transfer their skills and experience from one task to the next and the more easily they can learn new tasks. More importantly, you can help to mitigate some of the potential problems users could encounter when they use a new pen-based computer.
However, adhering to these design guidelines does not guarantee usability. The guidelines are valuable tools, but you must combine them with other factors such as design principles, task analysis, prototype creation, and usability evaluation. You know your customers best—what they want to accomplish and what keeps them from accomplishing their goals. Microsoft's commitment is to help you to give customers the richest, simplest, and most satisfying experience that they can have when running applications on Windows XP Tablet PC Edition.
The following sections discuss visual design guidelines for applications developed for Tablet PC: