If you guys were at the starting point of designing a new enterprise/business app, would you consider Metro style (WinRT) user interface for that?
We need:
- a sophisticated desktop app (WPF/MVVM) for editing multiple complex forms with hundreds fields, some forms/windows/pages can be quite hefty, so free space on the screen has to be utilised wisely. Access to all controls by mouse and keyboard. Using touchscreens is possible in the future (but I believe <5% of customers will use it).
- a web app for viewing data (much simpler than the desktop app)
- mobile apps for iPhone/Android with basic functions for offline tasks in the field.
UI should be consistent among all the apps. And I'm sure it wouldn't be a problem to design mobile apps with Metro (and probably the web app). But the desktop app might be too complex for Metro (due to big forms and lists).
Have anybody seen samples of enterprise/business apps with Metro UI?
P.S.
I've read many articles from MS (like Designing great productivity apps for Windows) and some sober views of things (like How suitable is Windows 8 Metro for business developers?) and still can't find a good approach for big forms and lists with Metro UI.
Would like to get something like Zune (on the picture below), but tend to think that it's impossible.
Best Answer
One or two years ago, our team was supported by professional UI designers to redesign a large forms-based application that we are developing (based on WPF). We had the same issues: customers want to display forms with sometimes hundreds of form fields, and ideally they want to see all fields on a single page.
The suggestion by the professionals was: convince your customers that this is a bad idea. Limit the number of fields per screen to maybe a dozen. Only then you will have a user interface that looks good and that is easy to handle.
Therefore, I think it is possible to have an enterprise app with complex forms in Metro, by splitting the complex forms into simpler parts. There are other criteria, however, you need to consider:
How willing are enterprise customers to upgrade to Windows 8? Considering that a large number of enterprise customers still use Windows XP (and sometimes even IE6), I expect them to upgrade only very slowly to Windows 8.
Will enterprise customers prefer Windows Phone 8 over iOS or Android? I am not sure about Android, but my current experience is that decision makers in companies think mainly of iOS when searching for a mobile enterprise application, simply because a lot of them already own iPad/iPhone devices. I think it might take quite some time until Windows Phone 8 comes into their focus.