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GLOBEtrack Blog

Further proof that nobody has a clue how to make a decent UI.

• 15) When you start it up, it takes about ten seconds (I counted) for the first window (the banner one, not the subsequent real application one) to appear. This is on a PIII/500. Windows, apparently, puts up a wait cursor for about four seconds, but then the cursor goes back to the arrow. So you really don't know if the app is working at all. Basically, you should have your first window up before the cursor stops being the wait one so I know you are actually working.
• 14) There are these frames that are empty, and sans title, yet they have scroll bars. They have both vertical and horizontal ones. The scroll bars even indicate that there is stuff outside the current view. When you scroll over to look at it, it turns out to be… nothing. It's all still completely empty!
• 13) The different windows (like the Admin one) do this thing where there menus (like File) and then buttons, and then some frames (like the ones with the stupid scroll bars). Below is a set of tabs, and you can pick one to be in a mode. So you can pick Users to edit users. The buttons along the top then apparently relate to the tab entry you are on. Only, some of the buttons are global things ("Manuals") while others are mode specific ("New…" and "Edit…"). The mode specific ones should be in the tab, not outside it! Like, there is a "Search" button, but the parameters for the search are set in the tab frame. But there is no Search button there, it's miles away at the top of the window!
• 12) The way they use an ellipsis in button or menu labels is pretty horribly wrong. According to the Java UI guidelines:

  If a menu item does not fully specify a command and users need a dialog box to finish the specification, use an ellipsis after the menu item. For example, after choosing Save As..., users are presented with a file chooser to specify a file name and location.

  Do not use an ellipsis mark simply to indicate that a secondary or utility window will appear. For example, choosing Preferences displays a dialog box; because that display is the entire effect of the command, however, Preferences is not followed by an ellipsis.

  So, for example, I think the "Reports..." button should not have an ellipsis. Same thing for lots of menu items, like "Admin:Tasks..."
• 11) When you are adding a new user, you hit the "New…" button. Another window comes up. It's not a dialog. But it does have buttons labeled "Save & Close" and "Save & New". But you can always just click "New…" in the Admin window and get another, different, User window. Whatever.
• 10) When you are adding the new user, you probably will want to give them a password. There is a field labeled "Password" which is editable. There is also a button labeled "Set Password". So there are two ways to set the password, apparently. But what is really going on is that when you use the "Set Password" button, the password you enter gets encrypted and added, whereas if you just type it into the field it's clear text (which would probably not decrypt into anything useful). It just seems to me that there has to be a better way to set all that up. Like, don't have the password field alterable (but you can still select and copy it) other than through the "Set Password" button, and have that button right next to the field.
• 9) After you've added or altered a user, the list of users doesn't change in the Admin window! You have to explicitly hit the "Search" button again. I mean, who would actually want any feedback, now?
• 8) When you go to set user privileges, you have to type in the user name. There is no way to search there, no scrolling list from which to choose, nada, just a totally blank text field you have to populate. Then, you have to know to hit enter to get a list of the privileges available for that user. There's no "Search" button, presumably because that would be too consistent with how the other windows work.
• 7) So there's "Close" in the File menu, and then there's also "Exit." Of course, exit is right after close, so it would probably be pretty easy to pick the wrong one. Of course, exit gets out of the entire application whereas close only gets out of the current window. That's a pretty big difference for such a small physical distance. Let's put the nuclear weapons launch button right next to the door buzzer…
• 6) There are guides that come with the system to help you figure out how to use it. They are are in PDF. They do not have hyperlinks in them, so you see stuff like "Follow the instructions to stop GLOBEtrack in Section 2.1.3 for UNIX and Section 2.2.3 for Windows" without any links. Hello?
• 5) The "Edit Bug" window sucks, in several ways. It is trying to be much more cute than the rest of the system (that I've seen so far, anyway) and so sticks out, badly. There are big icon buttons on the page, rather than buttons with word labels (so that's totally unlike all the other windows). The icons are, well, ugly, and some are horribly un-mnemonic. Even though it is the Edit Bug window, someone decided that there needed to be (not so) little red bug icons everywhere in the window: "[Bug] Reported By", "[Bug] Information", "[Bug] Exists In", etc., all of which would be much better without the stupid icon; it's redundant. In this window there is a field for entering the person who reported the bug. The field's label is also a button, which naturally I expected to give me a way to select from the list of known users. Instead, it just lists options like "Clear", "Take", and "Compose Email." Note that these options appear as a pop-up menu from that button, but the button just looks like a regular button; there's no little "I'm a Pop Up Menu" arrow thingy, even though in other places in the application, pop up menus do, in fact, have that. The absolute kicker is that if you enter in, say, a company name that isn't in GT's database, after you've entered it (hit tab, enter, whatever) it then puts up an error dialog saying "No matching companies." Truly awe inspiring work, here! Then, there's a tabbed area with tabs like "Details" and "Cause" and "Workaround." Each of the tabs, except for the Details one (maybe because it's the first one?), has a little ball icon next to the label. The ball is gray. When you type stuff into that tab and then go to a different tab, the ball turns blue, presumably so that you can scan across the tabs and see which ones have data in them. The balls don't change color as soon as you enter something, instead you have to explicitly move to another tab for the color to get updated. When you are in anything other than the Details page, since it doesn't have a sphere at all, you don't know if it has info in it. So much for consistency.
• 4) Is it me, or is there no way to set issues up in a hierarchy?
• 3) When you do a search that goes and hits the database for a while, there doesn't seem to be any feedback like a progress bar or a wait cursor or anything. So you aren't sure if there just aren't any results, or if the process is still going.
• 2) In the "Bugs" tab of the main window, when you do a search the results have a title bar that you can presumably use to change the sorting of the results. It has some check boxes which turn out to be the things you use to select the sort order. Note that they are not even radio buttons. Also, if this is what the Java UI standard is for this kind of widget setup, I'm greatly saddened. Sheesh. The kicker here is that the check boxes aren't given enough space and their left hand sides are all chopped off! Also, the columns appear to be fixed width: even if all of the text for the Synopsis column fits on the screen, it has some fixed size which goes off the edge and so the horizontal scroll bar makes it look like there is perhaps useful information out there, when in fact there isn't. Why not clip the width down to the widest text?
• 1) When you are generating reports for immediate viewing, it looks like you can't have more than one. If you generate another, it first deletes the one you already had. I guess because I'd never actually want to compare or cross-reference reports? Oh, yeah, and while I was trying to get a report of all bugs fixed from the demo database, the task just locked up. The "Task Progress" window just sat there and didn't update itself. So I had to hit "End Task" which worked, and then tried generating the report again. This time I got a huge java.lang.IllegalArgumentException stack trace that was complaining about date formats. Now that's what the Danes call quality!