What makes a good design? Easy to learn what to do Efficient to use Allows the user to focus on their job rather than on the program There are a large number of principles that lead to these qualities. Usually there is no perfect design. What are good colors and rules of thumb when trying to design a good user interface? Bright colors should be reserved for when attention needs to be attracted You need sufficient contrast between foreground and background for readability. Be aware that a significant portion of the population is color-blind (most common form is red/green) Use color conservatively Test real world designs with real users What guidelines do we follow when adding colors and effects? Use color conservatively - Try to keep to 4 or fewer colors on a screen/form Use color consistently - to have consistent meaning (for example in our interface to Visual Studio, it uses blue for keywords, green for coments, etc) Just how important is the UI Design? Will it make or break the program? Yes. To most users, the interface is the program (they're not even aware of what goes on behind the scenes). If a program is hard to learn or hard to use, it will not be used. Word of mouth will kill sales. How do you know what are the best colors to use from a user standpoint? Test real world designs with real users How to use scope to better my programming? Use procedure scope whenever possible. When you HAVE TO, use module scope. Never use the same variable name in both Maybe another explanation of scope with other examples I will try to put together something When we are writing comments, is there any restriction on how long or short they can be? Long enough to explain what is going on. A single line of comment could be very wide, but making it wider than the screen / page of paper when printed makes them hard to read How many comments are recommended on a certain program? Does it depend on the length? It depends on the length and complexity. I believe there should be top-of-program comments, a comment for any complicated calculation, a comment for each branch, a comment for each loop, a comment for each function/procedure/method that you write A little more elaboration on concatenation would be nice. Concatenating strings is sort of like adding numbers. If dim first as String = "John " dim last as String = "Johnson" then first & last ==> "John Johnson" so dim wholeName as String = first & last would result in wholeName holding "John Johnson" There is an extra simplicity that allows numbers being concatenated with strings to be automatically converted to string. So if dim answer as Integer = 42 ` dim head as String = "Answer: " then we can concatenate using head & answer instead of having to do: head & answer.toString() So we can pass as parameter to msgbox (which needs a string): msgbox(head & answer) When will I ever use the \ in a statement? The more mathematical programming you do, the sooner you will use it. There's a www page with some examples http://web.uccs.edu/wbahn/ECE1021/STATIC/REFERENCES/MathReview.htm but they use Java and use two dimensional matrices, so they're way beyond what we've talked about. How can I make my assignment better? Talk to me individually How are we going to integrate this into our next lab? I'm not sure what will go into the next lab. You probably will not have to use module level scope yet How am I going to learn this when most of the class already knows it? Most of the class DOESN'T already know it. And you will learn it by reading, going to class, and working hard!