>>>>Hello,
>>>>
>>>>I just wrote an article about building user friendly interfaces, maybe that is of interest for some of you or you have some ideas to add from your own.
>>>>
>>>>http://cisberner.wordpress.com/
>>>
>>>I've always said that anyone who is going to create good user apps should first do the user activity. In other words, do data entry on 'bad' data entry screens and then on 'good' data entry screens and pay attention to what the differences were.
>>>
>>>Keep in mind who you're programming for. Managers, for the most part, like bells and whistles, lots of mousing and drop down lists and such. People in the trenches want speed.
>>
>>
>>For me, that is one of the most frustrating things aboput programming. Our typical; "user" is not the decision maker. So our marketing staff (bless their hearts) continue to request "flash", which the typical head-down user couldn't care less about. Unfortunately (or fortunately, if in sales), flash sells.
>
>And when you try to explain it to marketing, they don't understand. That's when I sit them down to the 'flashy' DE screen along with a representative stack of whatever needs entering and tell them they have 15 minutes to enter the stack. They'll start seeing the light. Of course, this is also assuming that you can get to someone in the marketing department to do that.
>
>I have, however, done that to management types, both mine and my customers, to show them the difference between 'flash' and data entry.

Did you read the book "The Inmates are Running the Asylum"? Try to extract some of the most important ideas and present them to your colleagues. This book has a lot of good information.