Windows Vista, new guidelines for the user interface

Today I was making my weekly blogs review, and I found an article in Ave Mundi, that took me through a comment by Manu Calero, to the MSDN home page, and I found an article that sets the new guidelines to follow to be coherent with the new Windows Vista interface.

Here the link:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/UxGuide/UXGuide/Principles/TopViolations/TopViolations.asp

More than a "guide" itself, this page shows things you have to avoid when you are writing a program to be ran under Windows Vista.

The first suggestion of MSDN is to read this article: Top Rules for the Windows Vista User Experience there you will find 12 simple rules about how to create a user interface in a compatible way with Windows Vista.

After reading this article, we can go to the "Controls" section, here we'll find which are new controls for Windows Vista, and how we should show these controls to the user, the "old" controls are also included in this review.

This guide also has a Text section, this section explains the way we should give instructions to the user in the screen, and the "tone" we should use in our text in order to make them more comprehensive to the final user.

This full featured guide offers also topic related to Windows and Dialogs design, error and warning messages, and also about the use of icons and images.

It really worth the time to give a look to it in order to be prepare in the way we should be programming in a very near future, Windows Vista will be hitting the road in a very short time.