Overview
Introducing Microsoft® Expression Blend™—an all new, full-featured professional design tool for creating engaging, sophisticated, and Web-connected user interfaces for Windows®-based applications. With Expression Blend, you can deliver applications that are more usable and that achieve greater end-user satisfaction and productivity. Leverage the power of the desktop and the Internet to provide your audience with big impact, high performance user experiences that drive brand recognition and repeat use.
Who should use Expression Blend?
With Expression Blend, you can design cutting-edge user interfaces and collaborate with developers using the same tool. Thanks to a common file format, separate views for design and markup, and individual design and animation workspaces, you can work with Expression Blend in whatever way you feel most comfortable.
Designers can incorporate design elements from Microsoft® Expression® Design and other creative professional tools, while developers can easily open an Expression Blend project in Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 for enhanced development capabilities such as debugging and deployment. Conversely, developers can also open Visual Studio solutions in Expression Blend.
Expression Blend includes:
- Full suite of vector drawing tools, including text and three-dimensional (3D) tools
- Easy to use, modern visual interface with dockable panels and on-object context menus
- Real-time animation
- 3D and media support for enhancing user experiences
- Advanced, flexible, and reusable customization and skinning options for a variety of common controls
- Powerful integration points for data sources and external resources
- Real-time design and markup views
- Artwork import capabilities from Expression Design
- Interoperability with Visual Studio 2005 to allow designers and developers to work together more closely and efficiently as a team
Key concepts
Expression Blend introduces some concepts that may be new to designers and developers. Learning these fundamentals early will make for easier times as you set forth to collaborate on your next project. This User Guide is intended to provide more detail about these key concepts, but for a hands on experience, you may want to review the sample projects that are available on the Samples tab in the Welcome Screen (on the Help menu).
Target application types
- Productivity applications Applications that improve productivity and efficiency for a broader customer base, as well as line of business applications such as Microsoft Office.
- Consumer applications Applications such as media players, security tools, and desktop gadgets.
- Games Simple desktop or online games intended purely for entertainment.
- Kiosks Applications intended to run on kiosks that users can interact with to get information, review product directories, check in at airport, and so on.
- IT pro utilities Tools for small jobs such as bug tracking tools that may be unique to a specific company or customer need.
Best practices
Some design ideas are good simply because they improve usability. Here are some common ways to improve usability with Expression Blend and .NET Framework 3.0:
- Model the real world. You can use custom visuals and interactions to make specific controls look and behave like their real-world counterparts. This technique is best used when users are familiar with the real-world object, and the real-world approach is the best, most efficient way to perform the task. For example, simple utilities like calculators just work better when they model their real-world counterparts.
- Show instead of explain. You can use animations and transitions to show relationships, causes, and effects. This technique is best used to provide information that would otherwise require text to explain what might be missed by users. For example, a book for young children could animate page turns to show how the controls work. Normal page turns would be harder for a young child to understand.
- Improve affordance. Affordance is a property of an object that suggests how the object is used (as opposed to using a label to explain it). You can use custom control visuals and animations to suggest how nonstandard controls are used.
- Use natural mapping. Natural mapping is a clear relationship between what the user wants to do and how to do it. You can use custom appearances and interactions to create natural mappings when the standard common controls won’t do.
- Reduce knowledge. You can use custom interactions to limit the number of ways to perform an operation and the amount of knowledge required to perform a task.
- Improve feedback. You can use custom control visuals and animations to give feedback to show that something is being done correctly or incorrectly, or to show progress. For example, the Address bar in Internet Explorer in Windows Vista shows the progress for loading the page in the background.
- Make objects easier to interact with. Fitts’ law states that the effort required to click on a target is proportional to its distance and inversely proportional to its size. For example, you can use animations to make objects larger when the pointer is near and smaller when the cursor is far. Doing so makes the objects easier to click. It also allows you to use screen space more efficiently, by making objects normally smaller.
- Focus. You can use rich layout and custom visuals to emphasize screen elements that are crucial to the task, and to de-emphasize secondary elements.
If designing for Windows Vista, consider adhering to the Windows Vista User Experience Guidelines to establish a high-quality, consistent baseline for all Windows Vista-based applications, no matter how they are implemented.