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Flex Article
Designing for Flex – Part 5: Designing content displays
Rob Adams
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Information design
- Navigating and manipulating content
- Merging content with feedback
- Merging controls and content
- Designing controls
An unfortunate myth prevalent among application designers and developers is that you should primarily focus on designing the chrome of the application, then provide space for the content. Some almost view content as an afterthought: a big box with an "X" through it in the wireframes, a place to put the stuff the database guys spit out, a consumer of screen real estate. Yet for most applications, content is what users care about; buttons, tabs, and panels are just a means for them to work with their content. Well-designed Flex applications, therefore, turn this philosophy on its head. Content displays are the key element of Flex application design. Application chrome exists only to support these displays, if indeed it must exist at all.
This chapter covers:
- Information design – designing applications around their content.
- How to design interfaces that allow users to navigate content.
- How to design interfaces that allow users to manipulate content.
- How to provide feedback on user actions in a content-focused interface.
- How to employ standard controls in a content-focused interface.
- How to design controls so that they don't take focus away from the content.
This is part 5 in the Designing for Flex series, which includes the following articles:
- Part 1: Overview and discovering Flex
- Part 2: Planning your application
- Part 3: Structuring your application
- Part 4: Merging the web and the desktop
- Part 5: Designing content displays
- Part 6: Guiding with motion
- Part 7: Making your application fast
- Part 8: Making your application safe
- Appendix A: List of best practices
- Appendix B: For further reading
I suggest that you read the previous parts before proceeding with this part of the series.
Download all parts of the FIG series as PDF files that you can print and read offline: adobe_flex_interface_guide.zip (ZIP, 5.7MB)
This content is a public draft. Please give us feedback in the Flex Interface Guide Forum.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.
About the author
Rob Adams works for Adobe Systems, Inc. in San Francisco, California. He started at Macromedia, Inc. in 2004 and has worked on the Flash authoring tool, Flash Player, and Fireworks, but nowadays works primarily on the Flex product line. He is involved with the design of the core framework itself as well as the designer/developer tools such as Flex Builder and Creative Suite. Although his primary focus is on design research, he also does some design work, promotes sound design practices both within Adobe and without, and makes himself a general pain in the necks of the designers, product managers, and engineers he works with.
