Friday, July 31, 2015

Adjusting the extranet GUI

When building a legal extranet, one would be wise to develop functionality which allows the administrator to alter the user interface. Some clients want large text, some want small text. Some want headings over sections, others do not. You'll definitely want to ability to place a client logo on a law firm extranet. We even have clients who request specific fonts or other variations in layout which are not closely aligned with the basic functionality of the system.

And, most notably, these types of request are often more important to a client than some of the basic functionality of a system (adding/removing fields, etc.).

One can debate which of these two types of changes are more important to the business, but the moral of the story is to build a system with some elements of flexibility in the user interface and don't hard code or embed all of the GUI settings within the application code.  If you can do that, the likelihood for user acceptance of the system can increase dramatically.