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New Activity form not Distinct


sprasad

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Our users are most unhappy about this new change and have asked for this to be reverted.

There is now, no visual distinction between the buttons like we had before and it slows down the process for users as they need to now, click carefully within the right button.

In the absence of an absolute necessity to apply a change to a Live environment in core business hours,  this change was not necessary and Developers need to be told to stop changing stuff just because they have found new toys. There also needs to be advanced warning, with justification for changes.   If the change cannot be reverted, then we need a customizable option in order to "Choose" to have the new view or use the existing Form.

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Hello Shalesh,

Thank you for the feedback.  I wanted to respond to your comments to clarify a couple of points. 
 

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There is now, no visual distinction between the buttons like we had before and it slows down the process for users as they need to now, click carefully within the right button.

I can see from the screen-shot you have provided this is clearly a problem for the way that task is configured in this instance.  We are actually following the research and style guide set down my Google Material Design, the reason for doing this is to improve the usability of our application - there is obviously a slight irony in that statement given the fact your users have found it harder to use.  I am not an expert on the specific rules around how buttons should be presented/work but I am pretty sure it would fall within the guidelines for us to do something about it.  In a case of a pop-up with a couple of buttons and moderate amounts of text the without board design works as you do get a background highlight surrounding the button as you move the mouse over it - this is what they refer to as a positive intent animation.  Do you not see an animation when you float the mouse over any part of the button? or is that my misunderstanding?    In any case we recognise the problem your specific form presents your users and will try to do something about it - I would suggest reducing the amount of text in the buttons would make it infinitely more usable, even with the old way of presentation - its very unusual to have more than two words in a button - "ON HOLD -AWAITING CUSTOMER RESPONSE" seems like a very long label.
 

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In the absence of an absolute necessity to apply a change to a Live environment in core business hours,  this change was not necessary and Developers need to be told to stop changing stuff just because they have found new toys.

 

With all due respect, this change was not driven by developers wanting new toys! This was a conscious product strategy decision made by Hornbill to move the product forward.  We have a number of areas we want to improve and modernize the user experience, not least in the employee portals and mobile apps.  Google Material Design is a reasonable choice to adopt in order to avoid the exact thing you are implying, it removes the "creative freedom" from developers to make their own impression of what constitutes good design.   One of the reasons your organization bought into Hornbill is our approach to Continuous Delivery, this is intentional, it removes the need for our customers to have to undertake big Upgrade projects - you can find out more about our approach here: https://wiki.hornbill.com/index.php/Continuous_Delivery
 

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There also needs to be advanced warning, with justification for changes. 

There was, we announced these changes at the last INSIGHTS event, @Martyn Houghton was present and aware of the changes coming, I did explain our justification and reasons for this change.  

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If the change cannot be reverted, then we need a customizable option in order to "Choose" to have the new view or use the existing Form.

Yes, we often do this but in this case it a CSS style change which is a lot more complicated to make optional so we opted not to go down that route and focused on ensuring the changes did not affect function. 

I am sorry this has caused you an issue, I will ensure we find a satisfactory solution to this in the next day or so. 

Gerry
 

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@Gerry

In terms of the technical/usability side, the Activity Outcomes which originally appeared with white text and filled boxes of the colour selected so the boundary between them where you can click was very distinct, rather than the reverse negative effect now. There is no animation of any kind when you hover the mouse over them highlight them which is present in other parts of the system, which is even the case the standard 'Cancel' and 'Follow Up' options.

Indeed some of the options descriptions are on the long side, however this was done as part of our transition to using new Sub Statuses of the same name to help our 1st Tier team during this change.

As are 1st Tier team are updating a large volume of requests all with workflows requiring the correct outcomes to be selected, the change created quite a bit of discussion on our internal work-spaces.

I think the main point to take from this is making sure that the UI change does not make an existing object harder to use, which being a personal subjective view, is not always easy to achieve or test for.

If the outcome buttons/selections can be delimited more clearly, such as by the animation used elsewhere in the new UI when hovering over them, this will alleviate the impact and make it very clear which outcome is being selected.

Cheers

Martyn

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Thank you @Martyn Houghton ,

Are you aware that there is a new feature (under an experimental flag)  that allows adding custom forms to the Tasks completion phase and also to each individual outcome?

That could help to reduce the number of outcomes you have and still use the BPM with the data from that form.

Although is still under " experimantal" and we are still improving this, it can help you. Let me know if you need further details about this.

Thanks,

Daniel.

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Hi @Martyn Houghton,

I made two mock-ups as options to improve the layout for activities for when you have many outcomes. 

The first one gives you the option to put two outcomes at the beginning and if there are more, these will be placed in a combo (more outcomes...)

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The second one, if there are more than two, it just switches to a combo box.

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The main difference is that the first option will give visual priority to the first two outcomes, the second one gives equal priority to all.

What do you think?

Daniel.

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@Daniel Dekel

My initial thoughts would be for option one on the basis it is closet to what we currently have and only requires a single click for the 2 main outcome (3 if only 3 outcomes), where as option two involves an additional click, position and click for every activity if there are more than 2 outcomes. I know it minor i terms of effort/time, but when you click on these many times a day it does make a difference.

I will ask my colleague internally as well.

Cheers

Martyn

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@Daniel Dekel

Would the number of outcomes displayed before going to the 2 plus drop down be dynamic, in terms of having shorter outcome label or would this be fixed?

Also at the moment you can not specify a hint/explanation text to be displayed when hovering over the button. If there was this option to include the longer description/clarification, then the outcome labels could be smaller.

Cheers

Martyn

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Hi @Martyn Houghton,

I've raised a few requests already. 

  1. Allow reordering of the outcomes in the BPM. 
  2. Adding a description/hint to the outcome's label.

Once that is done, we will be able to make the UI change to display the outcomes as in the 1st mockup. The number of outcomes will be based on the number and not the size of the buttons. It will be quite unstable to do it based on button size because it can change form screen to screen and things can jump, is quite a bad experience.

I'll keep you updated on this change.

Thanks.

Daniel.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Hi @Martyn Houghton,

We've done the change and will be available in our next build.

There is going to be a Nano Training notice if there are too many outcomes so that people understand the change.

The Admin Tool also has already an option to reorder the outcomes and a tooltip for the outcome will soon be available.

Hope you find this change useful.

Thanks,

Daniel.

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Hi @Martyn Houghton,

We've received some good and some bad feedback about the change to the outcomes. Mainly is because some customers have Activities with 4 or 5 outcomes, just near the limit.

They say that in their case the layout was just fine. So I am asking maybe if we increase the number of outcomes to show without a combo from 3 to 5, if you think it will be work with you. 

Trying to please everybody, but is hard ;-)

Thanks,

Daniel.
 

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  • 2 weeks later...

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