Alexander Halser from EC Software

User Interface Design for User Assistance

EC Software is an innovative help authoring tool vendor based in Salzburg, Austria. Founded in 1993, we have over a decade of experience in the help authoring and documentation field. Our flagship product Help & Manual is an XML authoring tool for web-based and local online help along with print documentation and PDF files.

A New, Revolutionary UI

When we started with the development on Help & Manual version 5, we basically rebuilt the application from the scratch. The wish list was very ambitious – integrated concurrent multi-user authoring capabilities, active version control integration, a new and twenty times faster XML engine and last but not least, a fresh intuitive user interface: The ribbon.

Screenshot 1. Main application window with ribbon user interface

With more than 10 years of experience in help authoring, we know that user interface design is as important as the documentation of a program. A well-designed user interface is a selling point, especially when you distribute software via the Web. The new ribbon interface – despite being quite controversial – is not just a fancy innovation from Microsoft, it really helps new users to get started with an application more quickly and easily, and this is another key selling point. And while an efficient UI design is essentially the programmers’ task, the individual UI components are also very important. This also includes all the small details that are so often neglected: an incorrectly painted corner here, an annoying flickering there, a combo box that does not precisely match the style of other editing controls. Ultimately, these details make an application stand out from the crowd and lift it above the level of mediocrity. In other words: we wanted a ribbon, we wanted matching UI controls and we wanted nothing less than perfection.

Choosing Developer Express

Developer Express has a long history of creating well-designed UI controls and commitment to quality. Quality in appearance, in the underlying code and in customer support if something doesn’t work as advertised. We tested three ribbon controls for Delphi 2007 with different levels of success. One was still pretty much in a beta state, another one seemed mature and quite flexible, but it was very slow.

The DevExpress ribbon components met all our criteria and we were especially impressed by the painting speed of the components, despite the overhead which such a graphical UI unavoidably creates. It was immediately clear that the developers had paid a lot of attention to details and that the code was skillfully designed. This was professional software engineering at work! That impression was reinforced when we purchased the source code for further testing, which revealed a highly scalable design and an intimate knowledge of the VCL.

Screenshot 2. User interface detail

Conclusion

We are now using the DevExpress ribbon, the toolbars and the docking components together with several sub-classed ribbon controls that we developed exclusively for Help & Manual. There was a learning curve before we fully understood the inner workings of the component suite, but once we were through this learning phase, it was relatively easy to extend the functionality. The components proved to be extremely stable and this means something when you have thousands of Help & Manual installations in countries all over the world.

Alexander Halser, CEO
EC Software GmbH
http://www.ec-software.com