Article - Designing LabVIEW User Interfaces with Hand-Drawn Paper Mock-Ups

[Tomi_Maila]

I've just posted a new Expressionflow article, take a look

Designing LabVIEW User Interfaces with Hand-Drawn Paper Mock-Ups

User interface may be the one most important part of your LabVIEW application. It’s the only part of the application the end-user is directly in contact with. Still user interface is often the part of a LabVIEW application developers spend the least time with in the development process. Does LabVIEW make creating decent user interfaces too easy to be ignored in the design phase? ...

Tomi

[altenbach]

Nice article! Thanks.

Maybe NI should come out with a LabVIEW toolkit that would allow the desing of UI mockups directly from within LabVIEW. 😮 Just kidding. 🙂

(Actuall, for me it's often easier to just drag a few things (graphs, tabs, buttons, rings, etc.) on a new front panel and move them around to my liking to play with design ideas. The code can come later. Even if the code is fully in place, it is easy to change the FP layout at a later point.)

[Marc_A]

I'm the same way as you, altenbach. I've always been that kind of programmer. I've thought about drawing UI mockups before, but I like to just jump right into a project, so there's not much planning involved. This works fine for UI, because that's usually easy enough to change. I don't recommend it for coding, especially in LabVIEW. It's more difficult to add code once you have something working because you have to worry about the layout of your code and where new things are going to fit. It's not as easy as pressing enter a couple times to make room for new lines. I've gotten a lot better at making compact cub VIs to make it easier to add code, though. I digress.

[smercurio_fc]

I'm the opposite, meaning I tend to agree with the method suggested in the article. I have lots of UI mockups within my notepads. Rarely do I start by placing things on a front panel, as I prefer to sketch them out first to get an overall idea of what things will look like. Most of the time I just find it faster to draw on a piece of paper than mouse things around. But that's just me.