1. The magical disappearing button
I’m sure we’ve all seen this one. Your new form, buttons lined up nice and neatly in the bottom right hand corner, all looks well and good until somebody decides to maximize it, then hey presto, one or more of the buttons shoot off screen somewhere.
Buttons need to be glued bottom, right to avoid this. So, run your form and maximize it just to check you’ve got your glueing set correctly.
There will always be one that escapes though, so keep your eyes peeled.
2. Subform forms and SubForm controls with different widths and/or heights
This is another quite common mistake which can cause problems with disappearing scroll bars amongst other things.
The basic rule is, if you’re designing a form which has a subform (e.g. a Sales Order or Purchase Order type form) make sure that the subform control and the subform itself are both the same width and the same height.
3. Extra space to the right and/or the bottom of forms
People will often design a form, expand the width and/or height of the form to make some room to move controls about whilst in design mode.
This is fine as long as things are set back as they should be when completing design of the form.
The rule is: 2 grid spaces of free air to the right and 2 grid spaces to the bottom.
4. Non-standard HeadingHeight’s on TableBox controls
I must confess to this as being one of my biggest annoyances and yes, some people may disagree but I believe the HeadingHeight property on a TableBox control should be left well alone.
It seems to be a common thing for people to increase the size of headings on table boxes when designing new or modifying existing forms, Sales Order and Purchase Order subforms being prime targets.
Now my argument against doing this is that there is simply no need. The choice should just be left to the user, if he/she wants more room to read the field names on the sales order subform for example, then they can quite easily increase the height of the columns and this setting will be saved in their zup file.
Bottom line: Let the zup file do its job.
5. Overuse of colour
This one speaks for itself really. People will often get the coloured crayons out and believe it to be an exercise in useablity and good gui design. Believe me, I’ve seen some quite hideous uses of colour on forms and it rarely never adds anything in terms of useability gains or user acceptance/experience.
Granted Microsoft themselves use splashes of colour here and there, but it is limited to some red text maybe to represent a negative number. This i would say is ok and quite subtle. Making the background colour of a column or text box bright green or yellow isn’t.
