Hi to all developers,

I am a new user on the forums so I hope this is the right place to ask a specific UI design question. I was trying to search for specific UI development forums or community but was unable to find any. Please don't be mad if this is not the right place to ask these sort of question.

We're small SW development company that specialize in data acquisition and analysis SW. Our flagship SW is called DEWESoft and is currently in version 7. This is very successful SW package that is used in variety of industries including automotive, aerospace, transportation, civil engineering and other places.

The main problem is we're small company and most of our stuff comes with engineering background (physics, math, electronics, algorithms) and we more or less not that good with UI design. We managed to revamp the SW GUI in version 7 from the ground up. We mostly succeeded very well and our customers are very happy with it. Except with one thing - which is very important part of our SW. I will try to explain clearly:

In the image below you can see the UI of our SW. Our SW has 2 main sections or modes if you like it:

- Measure mode: this is the mode where users set's up all the things for data acquisition. This mode is used to acquire data from various sources and store it to the disk. This mode is accessible in top left "Measure" button
- Analyze mode: this mode is used to do all various calculations, processing and analysis on the already acquired data. This is the button in top left with "Analysis" label.



We get various of feedback from our users who complain they do not know in which mode they re currently. And this is a very big deal, since we even know some users won't use new version of SW because of that. So we want to improve that really badly!

We spent number of hours discussing of those two buttons to switch modes. How they should look like, where to put them. And they look currently as you can see them on the image below. And according to the user feedback we got it wrong.

Now I would like to get some feedback and suggestions from you guys. How should we approach this UI problem? Do you have any ideas how should we design the UI to make these two modes easy accessible and visually clear to users in which mode they operate. Any kind of info, suggestion, feedback, idea from you guys would be more then appreciated for our brainstorming sessions.

Thanks a lot,
Jume