When you have a form with fields and captions for these fields, should you do it like that:

Field1: [                       ]
Field2: [                       ]

or like that:

Field1  [                       ]
Field2  [                       ]

I saw both used in popular application. Microsoft generally uses colons (My computer properties -> Computer Name tab is one example). Opera browser doesn’t use colons as separators on forms (example: Preferences form).

I personally don’t have a strong opinion on which one is better. But I’m working on this “1000s of winforms” app where I suspect we have forms with and without colons so I would really like to set a standard and go one way or another on all forms because the inconsistency is far worse than any of the options.

Is there any research out there showing whether or not alternating the row colors for a table increases/impedes the time it takes to parse information? An example can be found at the following location:

I generally find i…

This question is a bit more subjective, but I’m hoping to get some new perspective. I’m so used to designing for certain screen size (typically 1024×768) that I find that size to not be a problem. Expanding the size to 1280…

There are a lot of resources on the web about web applications design patterns, but only a few about desktop applications.

And this is quite strange as most of the business targeted software is (still?) desktop based.

At th…

Me and my team are (re)thinking some UI details of our main application.

It’s a “traditional” desktop application for the Windows platform. It’s a business targeted application, and our customers are accountants, professiona…