Reusable Widgets

Portfolio for Jonathan Reid

 

Screenshot of Bucket Widget

Often while designing user interfaces it is worthwhile to create a palette of re-usable widgets that can be designed and developed ahead of time, and then dropped in as needed. This speeds the design process because it gives you a palette of items to "cut-and-paste" into design prototypes, while enforcing a standard look-and-feel throughout the application interface. And it also speeds the development process, because the predeveloped widgets are re-usable code that is known to work.

One such common widget is the Bucket Widget, which basically allows the user to select one or more items and perform an action on those items. In the example screen shot above, taken from the DocBase Direct™ application, the Bucket Widget is being used to select a group of people to receive an email. In the past, I've used the same widget to design queries on a database, and even to create ordered sets (such as ordered sets of genetic markers in the Haplotype Manager in DMGenetics).