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Layout


The previous section described the components that are available for building an application. This section describes how to combine those components into a coherent application that encourages a user's sense of control. The guidelines presented in this section will help you create applications that are both consistent within themselves and with other OSF/Motif compliant applications.

This section discusses the following client area design topics:

Design the layout of your application windows according to the natural use order and the natural scanning order of the people who will be using your application.

First design for the natural use order. Consider the tasks that the user will perform with your application. The components should be positioned so that moving among the components is simple and quick while performing the most common tasks-the less pointer movement, the better. This is also true for keyboard traversal-the fewer keystrokes required to perform a task, the better.

The natural scanning order is most important when arranging small groups of components to help the user find the correct component for the task. You should put the most important and most used commands first. In most cases, this order is from left to right and from top to bottom. For users in right-to-left language environments, the natural scanning direction is from right to left and from top to bottom.