Ask HN: Need your feedback on application functionality/usability & UI

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1815242

by AppsOnCloud • 16 years ago

6 6 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

We are in the process of launching a cloud based solution that will help small businesses, departments/groups and freelancers to manage their customers, employees and projects.

I need help from the community to give feedback on application functionality/usability and user interface. Any form of guidance and suggestion (as well as criticism) will be greatly appreciated.

What problem are we trying to solve? Having worked with several small and medium sized business, we’ve seen that they do not have IT/technical resources (and budget, of course) to deploy tools and solutions that automates data management of customers, employees and related interactions. We are trying to solve this problem by providing cloud application that will give necessary functionality to businesses, all integrated with each other and will not require any IT/technical resources to maintain it.

Currently, the functionality includes customer management, customer support/portal, project management, employee management and business collaboration using twitter/yammer style messaging as well as document sharing.

We’ve setup a demo account that can be used for login to the application (or you could create your own beta account at http://www.appsoncloud.com).

Demo application URL: http://bit.ly/doMilQ

You can use any user name/password combination from below list:

1. demo/demo - Employee login

2. demo1/demo1 - Employee login

3. demo2/demo2 - Employee login

4. demo@client.com/demo - Customer login (to access support portal)

J3L2404• 16 years ago

Pie charts should be larger - Activities list should be shorter - Recent timesheet hours should scroll - Maybe some subtle background graphics. Everything is a little too small and a little too busy. Hope that helps.

AppsOnCloud3• 16 years ago

Thanks for the feedback! Currently we have pagination instead of scrolling. If there are more than 7 records, it will automatically display <prev> & <next> page options. Actually we had discussed this with some UX guys and the feedback that we got from them was that pagination is better than scrolling - specifically if you have multiple sections in a page.

We'll definitely take your inputs and try to clean up the home page and add more graphics.

spking• 16 years ago

1. On the authentication screen, white text is displayed over a light gray background which makes for very bed legibility.

2. Can some of the sidebar widgets be collapsed or even removed to help reduce overall noise?

3. I'd suggest moving the "Activity Update" panel above the "Tasks" panel, just under the user's name and profile photo, since updating status is presumably the primary goal for most users.

4. The "Edit Profile" button below the primary navigation could be removed and replaced with a hover invitation link next to the user's name or perhaps by clicking the profile photo, further reducing the number of elements competing for attention. On a related note, could "My Tasks" be removed since it is already displayed prominently in the main content area?

5. On "Case" pages, the actions displayed below the primary navigation are difficult to visually scan and parse. This is compounded by the fact that unrelated buttons share colors, making it difficult for the user to create a mental model and anticipate expected behavior. A dropdown menu of options might be more appropriate to show all available actions in this case, and would further reduce overall noise.

6. There is another usability issue to consider with the buttons placed directly below the primary navigation bar. If I run the cursor too close to the top of the target area for the buttons, I can easily trigger a dropdown hover from one of the primary navigation menu items above it. That could get frustrating in everyday use.

Have you done any structured usability or task completion testing with real users yet? Check out Steve Krug's book "Rocket Surgery Made Easy" for some ideas there. You could also gain a lot of inexpensive insight using services like feedbackarmy.com, userfly.com or loop11.com. Hope that helps.

AppsOnCloud3• 16 years ago

Thanks for taking time providing feedback! Very useful comments from end user usability perspective. Will definitely try to incorporate these changes to the application. For #1, this is customized per organization - it's my mistake - didn't spend much time to customize the login page for the demo account.

As a bootstrapped company, it is always a challenging situation when you've to spend moolah :-) I'll look into the links that you've provided for usability testing to see what fits our budget.

snsr• 16 years ago

Lots to test, so I'll just give my initial impressions after a brief look:

- Red "Required" error text after submitting an incomplete form frequently overlaps <input> descriptors

- Seems like secondary main nav li items should be indented and have text-decoration:none

- I might like to see Projects and Customers/Support segregated somehow from Employees. Ordering in the main nav doesn't seem to reflect priority.

- Important secondary nav buttons are sometimes grey, sometimes blue. ie- "New Task" @ Home > My Tasks

AppsOnCloud3• 16 years ago

Thanks for providing valuable feedback. I did get couple of feedback on the secondary main navigation - which is very useful. I didn't get your 3rd point wrt. "I might like to see Projects and Customers/Support segregated somehow from Employees"? Can you please provide some more details?

For #1, we'll do some more testing with different browsers. BTW, what browser did you use?

Ask HN: Need your feedback on application functionality/usability & UI

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