Dock Usability?

[John Smith]

Does anyone have any experience or seen any reports about the usability implications of using Dock in their web applications? My partner and I are designing an app, but disagree about the use of dockable windows.  Our users, are not technical people, but rather "regular" business people.

He wants our users to have the ability the customise their interface - a nice goal - however, I'm concerned that for non technical people it could be too confusing, and may make support much more complex.

Thanks for any insights you may have in advance!

[Slav]

Hello John,

Please elaborate on the customizations of the interface that you want to achieve, are they related to repositioning parts of your pages or do you want to be able to edit the content of the dock controls?

Customizing the layout of a page is a useful feature and the RadDock control is designed to be implemented in such scenarios. It allows specifying RadDockZones, in which the movable content, wrapped in a RadDock, can be placed. You can also save the layout of the dock controls in a storage medium of your choosing. Nevertheless, it is up to you to decide if such a functionality will be appropriate for your application.

I would suggest checking the help documentation and the online demos of the RadDock control before choosing  whether to use dockable elements, as they will give you an overview of the control's features. The examples in the following demos are related to the layout personalization that you want to achieve:
 - Load/Save Layout;
 - My Portal;
 - Portal Page;

I hope this helps. Feel free to let us know if you need further assistance.

All the best,
Slav
the Telerik team