I’m sure you’ve all seen them. Line of Business UIs that have logic such as: ‘When ComboA is selected, query for values based on that selection, and populate Textbox B’, or ‘When ButtonC is pressed, disable Textboxes C and D’, and on and on … it gets particularly bad when you can have multiple permutations of the logic above.
If presented with the chance to redesign one of these lovely screens, how would you approach it? would you put a wizard in front of the UI? would you keep the single screen paradigm but use some other pattern to make the logic of the UI state maintainable? what would be the process you use to determine how this would ideally be presented and implemented?
Not that I think this should matter for the responses, but I am currently presented with just this ‘opportunity’, and it’s an ASP.NET web page that uses javascript to respond to the user’s choices, disable controls, and make ajax calls for additional data.
Something you might want to look at is whether some of those dependencies don’t imply that while looking similar and serving the same functions these elements should be split out over multiple pages that are similar but actually different. Someone maybe grouped these onto on page because there were enough similarities.
If you can try looking at the problem as if it were not implemented at all, how would you structure the user interface if you had to implement it now. If it is too radically different and existing users would have major problems, you might have to compromise. But as Elie said look at it from the users view. They are the ones that have to work with your product.