New Improved Hornbill UI Navigation

[Martyn Houghton]

@Daniel Dekel

One thing that we have noticed is that the new navigation dialog will open as you mouse hovers over the top left-hand icon, but will not disappear when you move the mouse outside of the dialog that pop's up and you have to click to get it to close. It would be better if the dialog closed when you mouse pointer is outside of the region.

Also would be good to be able to added your own favourites at the bottom, i.e. to go straight to Request List in Service Manager etc.

Cheers

Martyn

[Daniel Dekel]

Hi @Martyn Houghton ,

Favourites is coming soon after being requested by many people :-)

Thanks,

Daniel.

[Lyonel]

Just spotted the "Favourites" addition: looks GOOD! Sorts out all the small "issues" I had with the new interface (after using it for a few weeks). Good Job guys!

[TSheward_SGW]

Ditto, great addition, much better with the favourites! Thanks guys!

[Ronny Silooy]

The 'Pin to Favourites' is a good feature. But i would call it great/amazing is the 'Pin to Favourites' would pin the icon on the top screen next to the email icon for even faster access to it.

[Gerry]

Hi @Ronny Silooy,

Thanks for the suggestion, I am not sure how practical that would be to implement, its difficult to manage once you have multiple places to pin stuff to.  The icons at the top-right appear there because there is "unread" stuff, the idea being you can have fast access to the stuff that you need to action.  The problem with pinning to this area is relating to responsive design issues, we always need to be mindful of the screen real estate we are taking up with new features.  We will continue to evolve this, our aim is always to keep things fresh and improve usability based on customer/user feedback. 

Gerry

[Ronny Silooy]

Hey Gerry,

Okay, thanks for the reply. I understand what you are saying.

Ronny

[Keith]

I notice that the Home icon now appears to show a count of my activities which to me seems like a duplication of my Notifications.

 

Keith

 

[Gerry]

Keith,

The count on the Home icon there shows how many unread posts/comments you have on one or more of your workspaces. There is difference, the two counts can be different as the notifications can contain other notifications as well.  At first glance it may seem counter intuitive but in use it will make sense. 

Gerry

[David Brookes]

Would it be possible to add a mouseleave/mouseexit event to the NAV UI as this gets in the way when having to use the browser back button, should the mouse pointer skip over the NAV UI menu icon after using said browser back button (chrome), and in some cases the menu will not disappear, leaving you with the only option but to click somewhere off the menu that I didn't ask for, alternatively have the menu only appear when it's clicked?

Regards, David 

[Daniel Dekel]

Hi @David Brookes,

We are aware of this issue and we are looking on a similar solution to what you suggested. We'll keep you updated regarding this.

Thanks,

Daniel.

[nasimg]

Getting a lot of feedback on the new UI which I have been testing for a while but didn't realise had gone live in our instance on Tuesday - so I didn't info my team.

Was there supposed to be some communication about the change?  If there was I missed it, but I think for something as major as this it would be better to post something on the major groups particular Service Manager.

[Daniel Dekel]

Hi @nasimg,There was a clear message with a days countdown if you were using the old menu. The same regarding the old email view. The original date for a switch was the 3rd of April but it was delayed until this week.

[Daniel Dekel]

This is how it looked like if you used the old menu.

[nasimg]

Thanks @Daniel Dekel

This is helpful - but remember I was already using the new UI so wouldn't have seen this countdown on the old menu to warn staff of the change.

Perhaps a message on the new menu (where it said "back to the old navigation") saying this was going live would be a "belt and braces" approach. But I appreciate its not easy to get the amount of communication about a change right (too much or too less you get moans).

Nasim

[Daniel Dekel]

@nasimg yes,  we assumed that if you already used the new menu there was no need to bother you anymore with these updates. But perhaps you are right, there should anyway be a communication. Lesson learned ;-)

Thanks,

Daniel.

[Gerry]

@nasimg

I think the problem here is there is a difference in our understanding of our communication approach.  Unlike the Supportworks world where we communicate change via the Supportworks admin, with Hornbill we assume our communications with regards to UI changes is with each "user" of the system. In other words, we do not have any process to try to communicate this through the system administrator, we have assumed that having the preview and (in this case very) advanced notice and countdowns of the change that any internal communication a customer would need to have with the end users would already have been had.

In this instance our communication about the change was about as good as we could get it.  It seems odd that your users are in any way "surprised" about the change as the communication, including a 30 day final countdown, a link to the discussion on the forum as well as screen shots and other information have all been presented to the end users through the application since January. 

We have sold our customers on the idea of "Continuous Deployment" and so if we are to continuously deliver value on this we need a way of delivering functionality without being gated by each customers own internal communication and readiness planning, otherwise we are back into the world of long term releases and "upgrade projects" which is not what I think our customers want.

Perhaps it would help if we could understand "why" you are getting a lot of feedback now, and given our communications what we could do to improve this.  To make this work we (and you) need to encourage your users to embrace the evolution and to take on the features (after feedback of course) *before* it ultimately gets forced upon them. 

Would love to expand this conversation. 

Gerry

[nasimg]

Hi @Gerry

Thanks for the reply - yes its very true now we are in the cloud and have get the improvements with little or no interaction from us (the customer) which has great benefits. I think partly the issue is any change brings feedback (good or bad), also being IT we are used to controlling how updates happen (eg. Supportworks hardly changed in the 4 years we ran it) so its getting used to the fast pace of these improvements and not having control on when they are applied is something we have to get used to. That's the reason I think an interface change needed communicating - which I agree you did, but when I asked staff who raised this with me all said they hadn't noticed the countdown. Again I not saying everyone said this (we have 159 analysts) but the ones that did feed back all said the same thing - plus even I wasn't aware of the countdown as I was already on the new interface. As I'm the main point of contact for Service Manager, I wasn't able to inform staff of the new interface change. Hence my suggestion of a message on the new interface saying its going live too (plus a post on the forum).

I always look at the Service Manager posts - not so much the other groups which do seem to have grown. This makes it more harder to follow changes but I appreciate its needed to allow for better organisation.

[Gerry]

@nasimg

I am afraid that the product is growing as is the use of its features so breaking up the forums into logical sections is really the only practical way to organise things. As I have no doubt you are discovering Hornbill is a lot more than just Service Manager so there is a lot to keep track of. However, in the case where we are making a big change we always place the link to the respective forum post in the app by the feature so as a general rule, I would suggest when we add a new feature and post such a link its probably a good idea for you to simply follow the post, that way you will be notified via email as the conversation develops - thats the best way to keep track of these changes if you need to. 

Thanks.

Gerry

[Guest]

On 1/30/2017 at 10:40 AM, Martyn Houghton said:

@Daniel Dekel

One thing that we have noticed is that the new navigation dialog will open as you mouse hovers over the top left-hand icon, but will not disappear when you move the mouse outside of the dialog that pop's up and you have to click to get it to close. It would be better if the dialog closed when you mouse pointer is outside of the region.

Also would be good to be able to added your own favourites at the bottom, i.e. to go straight to Request List in Service Manager etc.

Cheers

Martyn

To be totally honest  ,  I dont like it at all.             This is because it hangs around and doesnt disappear ,   if you made it a  CLICK ONLY  event  that would be preferred.       It doesnt dissapear when clicking away from it , especially when in an email.

[Daniel Dekel]

Hi @Steven.Hawkins,

We are going to try different things to improve the usability of the new menu. Regarding the click is a bit debatable based n previous comments, because some people don't want to be doing an extra click to select an option, but this is maybe because they were used to the old menu.

We are also planing some more improvements around the menu, so it will continue evolving and becoming better.

Maybe the click will be optional based on configuration, will think about this.

Thanks for your comments,

Daniel.

[Gerry]

@Steven.Hawkins

To be honest I too have struggled a bit with this, it was brought up internally a few times and as @Daniel Dekel says we are continuously looking to improve this.   The reason why it opens on hover is to minimise the number of clicks required, we ere aiming to not regress from the previous navigation scheme so we definitely need to do something with this

Gerry

[Daniel Dekel]

Hi All,

A few improvements were added to the Main Menu in the last build.

1. Click Mode - (at the bottom of the menu) That will switch from opening with a mouse over to a click. Also the mouse over (default) works better now.
2. Search the menu - (at the top) there is a new search option. You can start typing as the menu opens, that will bring you a list of options from the menu.

* Some tricks... Press Alt+M (Ctrl+M in Mac) to open the menu. Start Typing to search... Press Tab to go to navigate to the search results and press Enter to go to that option.

Hope you like these new features!

Daniel.

[Martyn Houghton]

@Daniel Dekel

Thanks for the update. That give people the option to decide for themselves.how they want to access the menu.

Cheers

Martyn

[nasimg]

Hi @Daniel Dekel

Yes I like them both :-)

Nasim