HomePractices Page 3 - The Importance Of Interface Text (part 2)
The Screening Process - Practices
In this concluding article, read about the specific things to bekept in mind when creating interface text for menus, windows, buttons,fields and application messages, and also find out how to design interfacetext for easy internationalization of your application.
Having got the menu titles out of the way, we now come to the screen, orwindow, titles.
Ideally, the screen title should reflect the menu option clicked for easeof understanding and reference.
There may be times when the functions available within the user interfacerequire more than one screen. For example, for an "Edit Item" function, thefirst screen may allow the user to search for an existing item, while thesecond screen displays the settings and allows modification.
In such cases, the first question to be asked is whether this is the normwith all such options. If it is, then you may assign nomenclature for thesescreen types - for example, "Search For Item" and "Edit Item Details" wouldbe appropriate titles. If, however, this is a one-off occurrence, and youcannot fit this screen into any of your existing types, you would be betteroff *not* setting nomenclature for the screens. Setting separate titles insuch cases merely adds one more level of complexity, and requires more helpmaterial for those users who get confused.
Another case is of screens that pop up in new windows for additional dataentry. Title these screens to indicate exactly the task they perform, orthe data they need. Trying to depict a link with the parent screen is notrequired, because the context is already set by the display of thesub-screen at that particular point.