Having spent 3 lectures introducing a stage 2 class to entity relationship modelling, I was wondering how to begin UI design in a more effective way. Then I met with the course tutors who had been doing ER labs in which some students were very lost.

As they spoke I realised that the students ‘hands’ had never touched data. So in the lecture, we began by looking at an ERD (Chinook) in SQL Server and then looked at the tables structure and content. We attached to the tables with Visual LightSwitch, followed by dear old Access, creating 1-Many-Many forms on Artists, Albums and Tracks in both. Suddenly we were in forms UX-land beginning a discussion on what makes a good form with two differently generated forms waiting to be polished.

Next time around I would traverse this path first before coming to ERDs intertwined with more UX design. This could be constructed as a Learning Path in SocialLearn.

Lightswitch is great for quick prototypes.