Real World

Brian C. Lanham

My first college professor told me, “You can write the slickest application in the world but, if it isn’t usable, no one will use it.” This point was emphasized by a situation wherein users of an application I wrote were more impressed by the colors displayed in the application than in some of the (really neat, I thought!) features that the application provided.

Users should be able to start using your applications quickly and easily. Depending on the type of application, you might have a very broad range of user types. E-commerce applications, for example, reach more types of people than do intranet applications. Creating a UI that provides consistency is difficult. ASP.NET 2.0 makes the task much easier. New features and controls, such as themes, master pages, and menus, are just some examples of how to improve the usability of your Web application quickly.