Have I mentioned that I’ve designed several iPhone applications? I have? Yes, of course I’ve mentioned it. I was being facetious. Designing for the iPhone had a definite learning curve. I had to transition from the relative freedom of UX design for the web to following the strict iPhone UX guidelines that Apple publishes.

Today, I’m starting to wireframe for my first WPF application. Another learning curve, another set of UX guidelines. And thank goodness for that! Have you seen a ribbon control lately? Very sophisticated, very robust, and chock full of menu-ing and controls.

While there are many required elements of the ribbon control, the very basic elements are:

• Core tabs — the tabs that are always displayed
• Groups — a labeled set of closely related commands

Some of the basic guidelines for developing a ribbon control include:

• Groupings must be task-driven.
• Be very careful to organize the groupings and tasks in a manner that reflects how your users work.
• Commonly-used tasks must have larger buttons.
• Buttons must be labeled, except for tasks so common that their icons have become part of the computer realm’s lexicon (bold, italic, etc.).

For more information, the MSDN library has a whole section on ribbon control UI guidelines. I encourage you to check it out.