Re:Techniques To Improve Your User Interface Designs
by mahipal on Tuesday December 16, 2008 @01:06AM
(#399265)
A good interface is intuitive, in the sense of both easily learnable and easily usable. I don't think you can really decouple the two. It sounds like you're mostly just displaying giant blocks of text, so I'd recommend this excellent slideshow on web typography:
It's a bit long, but very thorough and very helpful for content-heavy design -- and it gives you exactly the CSS you need. To summarize it very briefly: a little bit of white space goes a long way.
Obviously a contrived example, and you wouldn't want so many fancy colors in a professional setting. But the key point there is to align everything nicely, and go to the trouble of grouping related fields using fieldsets and legends.
http://www.slideshare.net/jeff_croft/elegant-web-typography-...
It's a bit long, but very thorough and very helpful for content-heavy design -- and it gives you exactly the CSS you need. To summarize it very briefly: a little bit of white space goes a long way.
It's also worth putting a little bit of thought into styling the forms, especially since unstyled web forms can be really hideous. Here's a quick walk-through of styling a web form: http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/css/css...
Obviously a contrived example, and you wouldn't want so many fancy colors in a professional setting. But the key point there is to align everything nicely, and go to the trouble of grouping related fields using fieldsets and legends.