Subtitles of the Movie

Over my two-decade career in FileMaker, I've seen a lot of solutions and what I wanted to do is outline some of the biggest problems I see and one of the biggest ones is interface. People make a lot of mistakes. People make mistakes in the areas of relational design and scripting, things like that, but you want to make sure your interface is good. It makes it easy to use, it makes it pleasant to look at, it defines your whole solution. So I want to cover that since we're, just got done designing an interface. I want to point out what's really important and some of the most common mistakes people make. And one of the biggest ones is abuse of color. People put too much color in their interfaces. The human brain can only handle a handful of colors at once and if you throw more than that at them, then it gets confusing and it loses its effectiveness. Now, I may have gone to the other extreme. We have, really, one color here; blue. But it really does stand out because we haven't made any other colors on here. Now, I'm not saying you shouldn't put more colors on here, we will add more colors, but you want to use them in the right place. You want to attract the user to the most important places in your interface and this is a very important place. You have the highlighted tab in blue and then this bar. So it attracts you right to this section right away so you can see you're in the customer section of customers. Now, we also have other colors here; black, white and gray. But they're more neutral colors. But they can also attract people and you can see that we have used each one of these colors effectively, or in the case of grays, blacks and whites, we only have on thing that's really white here and that is the field. The background of the field is white and it really attracts you. So you come up here and you start off at customer, you go on here and then you come down here and go ok, I'm going to enter into these fields. It's because it's the only white thing there and it stands out. So try to make sense of what you're using. Don't just place things on there and use colors willy-nilly. Think about how many times you're using them and what you're using them for. So use the same font. Use the same color for every field. Use the same font for all of your labels and things like that. Make sure that when you put something on there, if it's black and white, make sure the same black and white is used every other place. You know, make sure you use the same color up here for the tabs. You know, make sure everything is consistent across the whole thing and then people, every time they see white, they'll think oh, that's where I enter data. Every time I see blue, I'll know that's where I'm at. So don't misuse color. Use color wisely. Don't just go ahead and use black white and gray. Use it wisely. The other thing you need to consider is organization. And this is a big problem I see. Uh, you've got all these solutions out there like Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Photoshop. They're all professionally designed and you need to really, creating your FileMaker solution, compete with these big companies as best you can and you will not see these companies in their dialogs and things have things not lined up. So you need to make sure your labels are all lined up, your fields are all lined up, that there's the same amount of space in between these fields, there's the same amount of space here as is over here, there is the same amount of space in all these fields right here, these are all properly distanced, they're not different heights. Spend the time putting this together because it will make a gigantic difference. If people have any notice of anything on your system, they'll notice that things are not organized properly. So if they see two fields that are not spaced the same, well they'll notice it and they'll think, oh, well, this is distracting me. This is a lot of work and I always say that 50 percent of the work is on the interface; you know, lining things up, putting the right colors, thinking about how things work. You know, when you look at this button, does that make sense? Is fine good enough for that button? When you click on that button, does it do what they want? Is it easy to use? I mean, think about all these things. What you can do is once you've thought a lot about solutions and created several of them and really get good at FileMaker, you can create yourself a template. In fact, we're including one in the work files for you. It's called Blue, so it's Blue.fp7 and it does have a password on it. But if you open it up with guest access because you've forgot the password, it'll come to the help screen and you can look at the account and the password right here. Very easy and realize that the password is case sensitive. So all you do is you close the file, open it up and enter this account and that password and it'll open up. It'll open up a whole world of what you can do with a template. So when you come in here, first of all you're seeing all the interface elements are here. You've got access to every single one. But then there's much more. There's also all the fields you might commonly use inside of every one of your solutions, like all your housekeeping fields. Here's some checkboxes and radio button interfaces. Here's your, uh, previous record and next record in, in your recreation of the status area. There's all kinds of things in here. There are scripts in here and when you go into ScriptMaker you see all kinds of scripts in here of commonly done things. When you go into define database, you will see there are all kinds of fields in there. So you can create your own template if you want or you can start with mine. It's up to you. But eventually I think you'll probably want to create your own because everybody designs their solution a little bit differently and they may decide that oh, I really don't need creation date and modification date. I just need timestamps. So you might even take mine and modify it to your own needs. It's really up to you, but a template can help. You can simply duplicate this file and then rename the file to whatever the solution you're working on and then start working with it and you already have a lot of the work done right off the bat and you'll have a consistent interface. You'll know this is 800 x 600. You can save a lot of time by working with this and getting this consistency right off the bat.