Project Guide Design

This part of "Project Guide 101" summarizes the key design aspects of the Project Guide for Microsoft® Office Project 2003. When you design a Project Guide, you should keep in mind the general design goals and principles, understand when to use a guide, and use the guidelines for user interface design and for textual content.

Following are the overall design goals of the default Project Guide:

• Give new users a clear path to follow through the primary steps involved in the project management process.
• Increase the discoverability of the primary features in the application.
• Integrate the decision-making context and domain knowledge with an interactive user interface.

Before you start writing the code for a custom Project Guide side pane, it is essential to consider the page design and purpose. Following are general design principles for the default Project Guide pages in Project 2003.

• Create interactive pages   The Project Guide pages are interactive, which differentiates the Project Guide from typical Help content. Because the pages offer more than static text, you should design the Project Guide to invite and assist the user to accomplish tasks, rather than just offer information and instructions.

• Design rich user interfaces that instruct   HTML enables the design of rich user interfaces that provide the user with contextual information, domain knowledge, and interactive instructions. You should design your pages to display more than just controls and procedures. For example, the Project Guide page Organize tasks into phases first explains to the user why organizing tasks is a useful step in planning a project, and then provides the controls to do the step. Putting controls in the context of a task makes it easier for the user to understand them.

• Link to dialog boxes, don't duplicate their content   In cases where a novice user can easily use a dialog box that Project already provides to accomplish a task, the Project Guide does not recreate the dialog box. Instead, the Project Guide provides links that bring up the relevant dialog boxes or views.

  For example, you can easily add notes to a task in the Task Information dialog box. The Project Guide task Link to or attach more task information provides a link that brings up the Notes tab of the Task Information dialog box.

  Similarly, for tasks that require a lot of data entry such as entering tasks in a project, use the dialog box already designed for the job. For example, the Project Guide GoalAreaTask page for List the tasks in the project provides a dialog box with the Project grid control in the main window in which the user can enter tasks and task durations. The GoalAreaTask page itself does not include controls for entering task information, because the Project grid control dialog box is better suited for entering information about multiple tasks or resources.

The following topics describe specific design guidelines for custom Project Guides.

• Design Principles for Project Guides includes advice on when and when not to use a custom Project Guide, and examples of how to focus a Project Guide on one task.
• Designing the Project Guide User Interface describes the Project Guide user interface elements and how to use them.

After you have created a satisfactory design for a custom Project Guide, the next step is building it. For more information, see Side Panes.