I worked at a company a long time ago where the team leader had a saying "user is a four-letter word".
I'm creating grids all over the place in our application using DevExpress gridcontrol. It has a nice built-in navigator for editing and saving new records. I am attaching what it looks like. (No I'm not, I am having trouble attaching an uploaded file...I will try again later, but maybe you know what I'm describing).
One of my users just asked if she could have a Save and Delete button instead. I guess she could, but why when it's already built in? Are these grids really that hard to use?
There are 10 kinds of people in this world. Those who understand binary, and those who don't.
Here is my screenshot. I guess I had a blocker turned on. Does this built-in navigator look hard to use? I am hovering over the minus sign and I get a tooltip saying Delete. Clear as day, right?
There are 10 kinds of people in this world. Those who understand binary, and those who don't.
I find it very small, that's a lot of mouse travel if the user's messing with cells at the top of the window. There's a lot of potential for a sneeze to result in the wrong button click there.
Do the experiment I just did. Scroll this page so those buttons are somewhere in the middle. Move your mouse about randomly, then hands off. Close your eyes and put your hands on the keyboard. With your eyes closed, tap the up and down buttons a couple of times. Now, open your eyes and quickly move your mouse to click the "X" button, wherever it's ended up. How long did it take? Was it easy? If you had to do this 100 times per day, would you think it were so simple?
I think if you sat at her desk and watched her work, you'd find that she is having difficulty getting her mouse over the button she wants. It could even be true that her eyesight is not so good and it's hard to make out the right button, seeing as they're all the same color and the + and - symbols are relatively thin. Heck, it was hard for me to tell from the screenshot the checkmark and x were disabled.
So you could add some toolbar buttons, preferably with visually distinct markers. (Red/green can be problematic for color-blind people, so relying on shapes is more successful. Big, bold shapes you can tell apart from six feet away.) But I think this is a case of, "The user doesn't fully understand their problem so they're miscommunicating the need."
What she needs is a fast, deterministic way to perform the actions the buttons do. If that control doesn't have keyboard shortcuts for the button, you should find a way to add them. Then teach her those keyboard shortcuts. Make her a little cheat sheet if you can. It is likely she will find after a few days of using them, they're more convenient than the buttons would've been.
This answer is wrong. You should be using TableAdapter and Dictionaries instead.
OK, thanks for representing the other side. I told my boss what was going on, so we will be discussing this further. I just wish someone had tested earlier. I wrote a lot of grids all this way. If someone had complained up front, it seems like it'd be a lot less going back and fixing. That said, I do see that the "navigator" can be customized. I will look into some of the properties that are exposed. Maybe I'm just whining for nothing...
There are 10 kinds of people in this world. Those who understand binary, and those who don't.
Reply With Quote
