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Making a simple and user-friendly interface
What is simplicity? Simplicity is the quality of being effortless, clean and intuitive. It is not unexpected then that simplicity is commonly worshiped in GUI design. Often people intuitively dislike complication in devices and applications. Yes, a few individuals like figuring out how something works, but for most of us, not being able to operate a device causes wasted time and frustration, and that's not what we are to achieve.
If you are able to take a complicated device or a piece of software and by some means [rearrange, reorganize and redesign] the interface to make it easy to use and understand, then you're well on the path to providing a better user experience.
One of the techniques you can incorporate in your GUI design is Context based controls.
There are a few of attitudes you can take towards GUI design that lead to context and unity. One suggests that you should keep key elements consistent throughout your software or web portal to ensure that people know where things are and don't get mixed up. The other approach is to change controls or navigation according to the context of each screen or window. The context based approach is when you show only the stuff the individual needs to do the task they've approached in that single context.
A good illustration of the two attitudes can be found in the revision of the Microsoft Office GUI. Office 2003, as well as all the previous versions, used the design principle of keeping things consistent. There was a bunch of toolbars displayed on the screen constantly, and these didn't change whether you were working with tables, charts, text or images. Microsoft redesigned this interface in the release of Office 2007 applying a content based approach. At the top you now see a ribbon - or a set of buttons. When clicked upon, each tab shows a pack of controls relevant to any specific task, be it spell checking, processing graphics, or just writing.
The context related approach allows you to show fewer controls at any single time point, but it also gives you more controls that are critical to the current task. I wouldn't recommend using a context-heavy approach for all-purpose web interface design because for most websites people want to see consistent site-wide navigation. This is because every website is different, and it would make the browsing experience much harder if all the individual pages on a particular site were different too.
Having said this, this can be utilized for web applications because they're not just simple websites - they're pieces of software that live in the cloud. People are likely to spend a lot of time on a web app and will have more opportunity to learn how it works. The complexity of some web apps means that you really need to utilize the context based approach, because if you don't, there will be too much on the screen at any given time for anyone to process. By showing only a few relevant controls for a given task, your users can figure out what to do in much less time.
 Standard Toolbar Icons
Science Toolbar Icons
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CustomIcons is an ultimate tool for customizing the icons on you desktop, in Windows Start menu and many other locations. Using CustomIcons you can easily replace default Windows icons with the ones to your choice. Download it
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