Question

I’m creating a menu, but I think showing a window in each menu it’s so annoying. So I think showing an user control to a certain grid row is a good way. Look at this:

I’ve got a menu: Students and Groups. Then I select one of them, and it shows below a command list. If you click one of these commands, it’ll show an UserControl.

    private void AddStudentButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
    {
        AddStudentUserControl userControl = new AddStudentUserControl();
        grid.Children.Add(userControl);

        Grid.SetRow(userControl, 2);
    }

Although, at the same time, I’d have to create many buttons with event command. What do you think? Is a good way to present the data? If so, will you do me an example about how will you do this? I want to do different things or improve my code.

Answer 1

That’s an unusual UI paradigm that would confuse most users. UX design is as more about respecting decades of experience using conventional UIs than it is about interesting ideas. If you want to depart from convention, that’s fine (innovation is a wonderful thing), but it had better be for something vastly better than the status quo.

In this case, you could just use a tabbed interface to present students and groups as lists, with UI elements to add and remove elements bundled into each view (often a [+] somewhere in the header and an [x] next to each item, combined with mappings for the Ins and Del keys).