If you are working with normalized units you should use position values between 0 and 1 to set the position.
The following code creates a figure that is not taking the whole screen:
f = figure('name','Project','numbertitle','off',...
'menubar','none','units','normalized',...
'color',col,'position', [0.1 0.1 0.3 0.5])
I would suggest you to keep using normalized units also for all UICONTROL objects.