What kind of monitor cleaner would be required for Access?
There are the broad fields of psychology and human factors engineering
that have already been applied in the hardware and software platforms
that make up a large part of the user interface. Access and other
platforms work within the provided environments. Each of those
platforms make up such a small part of the universe that they seldom
get separate focus on their user interface alone. Alan Cooper used to
give user interface and user interaction a lot of attention centered
on VB. He has since moved on to applying the concepts to other
things.
The subject of "user interface design" gets a lot of play and will
continue to do so. I googled the quoted phrase and came up with a
goodly list. One interesting paper is
http://www.sylvantech.com/~talin/projects/ui_design.html
Microsoft has published a style guide and it's probably available from
their web site or in the form of a book from Microsoft Press.
About the best you can do is to read the generally applicable user
interface guidelines and information and then improve on it if you can
and apply it to your Access designs. Even before you decide on the
design specifics you should decide on the goals that are common to
your applications and organize your presentation to best achieve those
goals.
My overarching goal is to provide clarity and ease of use, followed
closely by efficiency, to the users of the application. The general
progression within my forms is always Top to Bottom, Left to Right.
Those things which must be done early in the current process are
located in the top of the form. Command buttons are normally
arranged to the right margin. Navigation buttons are at the bottom.
You may choose to organize differently. It's important to your users
that there is a consistent "look and feel" throughout your
application.
HTH
