Back in the game...
Been sick this entire past week, and sucked into video games the week before that which meant that productivity had to suffer somewhere. Ended up being my side projects.
Anyway, we had a birthday dinner for my dad last weekend which gave me a chance to talk to Tony about the software. Seems like I was WAY off-base on what he was expecting. My data grids with their "intuitive" functionality ended up being a complete waste of effort. He didn't find them intuitive, and when I got to thinking about it, it occurred to me that I had really over engineered it. He was expecting a "Save" button somewhere. The grid saved automatically when you clicked on another row.
It is a cool concept, and I personally love it way more than needing to press a button to save, but take a screen where there are currently no entries and all of a sudden you add a new item and can't click on another row no it is even less intuitive than it was before... basically in that event you had to press enter to commit the edits and then when the screen closed it would save. So I'm going back over my grids and implementing a save button instead. I'm removing all of the automatic triggers... will reduce overhead and chance of hitting issues with the service connections. Also, one of the reasons I considered it over engineered is that my original approach makes a lot of sense when you are editing or creating a lot of records on a regular basis, but most of the time on these screens he will look one thing up, or add or edit one thing and then close. The save button ensures that he wants any changes committed.
So, I'm trying to iron that out before Veronica is finished work.
On the topic of Veronica's work. She has brought her sister on board to help with customer service on occasion so this morning Veronica was showing her around the software and she complimented me on how good and easy it was to use. Always enjoy the compliments. Also, ironic that my second stab at software was far less usable than my first attempt.
Anyway, we had a birthday dinner for my dad last weekend which gave me a chance to talk to Tony about the software. Seems like I was WAY off-base on what he was expecting. My data grids with their "intuitive" functionality ended up being a complete waste of effort. He didn't find them intuitive, and when I got to thinking about it, it occurred to me that I had really over engineered it. He was expecting a "Save" button somewhere. The grid saved automatically when you clicked on another row.
It is a cool concept, and I personally love it way more than needing to press a button to save, but take a screen where there are currently no entries and all of a sudden you add a new item and can't click on another row no it is even less intuitive than it was before... basically in that event you had to press enter to commit the edits and then when the screen closed it would save. So I'm going back over my grids and implementing a save button instead. I'm removing all of the automatic triggers... will reduce overhead and chance of hitting issues with the service connections. Also, one of the reasons I considered it over engineered is that my original approach makes a lot of sense when you are editing or creating a lot of records on a regular basis, but most of the time on these screens he will look one thing up, or add or edit one thing and then close. The save button ensures that he wants any changes committed.
So, I'm trying to iron that out before Veronica is finished work.
On the topic of Veronica's work. She has brought her sister on board to help with customer service on occasion so this morning Veronica was showing her around the software and she complimented me on how good and easy it was to use. Always enjoy the compliments. Also, ironic that my second stab at software was far less usable than my first attempt.
Comments
Post a Comment