Usability Project

It is important that Sahana Eden is user friendly to ensure that it can be adopted quickly and easily used in humanitarian contexts. Ideally, usability enhancements should be integrated into the core framework, rather added as customisations to the applications. There are a wide variety of separate tasks which can improve usability, some of which are lists as separate projects. However it is also important to examine usability from a holistic approach to ensure that there is a consistent user experience throughout Sahana Eden.

• Instead of using Popups to adding new records in a form, have the additional fields be added inline in the main form. These could be loaded asynchronously in JS and hidden until needed.
  • see the Location Selector for an example
• Show help comments to the side when a field is selected.
• For autocompletes, give the option to add new data if no matching record is found.
• Improve styling to ensure that elements are aligned and utilise the screen real estate. Where there is spare space on the screen, elements should be centred (rather than far to the left)
  • e.g. dataTables' list_fields should expand to use as much width as is available.
• Develop better home page and dashboard widgets.
• Improve the design of the Menu See: BluePrintMenu
  • Proper menu API which allows (requires) menus to be constructed through the API but can then be presented in different formats automatically
  • Proper documentation for the API (including comprehensive test cases)
  • CSS for any menu formats implemented (including proper documentation for what to change where)
  • Look at how keyboard short cuts could be linked to the menu items
  • Look at how menu customisation could be achieved beyond a single session
  • A couple of example menu redesigns:
    • ​ExtJS
    • ​jQuery
    • ​Discussion
• Projects/Design/SahanaEdenTheme
• Projects/Design/Icons
• Usability Tickets
• UI widgets
  • Summary of all widgets currently used
  • Investigate which widgets are available in the wild (without adding any additional dependencies), e.g.
    • Convert the Autocomplete to a ​Combobox when #records < 50
      • ideally this would always return the 1st 50 records & then pull in others by AJAX
    • a Tree widget for Categorised resources (such as Item Catalog & Skills)
  • If necessary develop widgets that will dance to the Sahana tune
• Develop usability metrics, including:
  • Minimum clicks to reach a single page
  • Frequency of use of each page (analyse Apache log records for active Sahana instances)
  • Number of clicks to fully complete a task (need to understand work flow)
  • Number of clicks to complete the bare minimum of a task (need to understand work flow)
  • Location of all compulsory fields (are they before optional fields, if not why not?)
  • Consistent look (font, colour, layout, help)
• Possibly create design rules for developers to follow to allow for more consistent templates and user experience:
  • Number of columns in a table
  • Number of editable fields in a single form

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Also see:

• DeveloperGuidelinesUsability