Published
2010-02-22 09:53
DGG and I have been discussing a small modification to the Contact page that we think will have a nice impact on usability for people who spend a lot of time working inside of the contact record. After some thought, we decided that it makes sense to move the edit/dashboard/vCard and "Create activity" buttons up and outside of the Summary tab. We'd like to change the "Create Activity" dropdown into an "Add ..." dropdown that could include contributions, activities, cases, memberships, relationships and notes. This will have the effect of removing one click from the process of adding any of these (commonly used) entities to a contact, as well as surfacing many of the "jump-off" points that administrators use on the contact page.
Additionally, it seems that the order of the buttons could be re-worked. Specifically, the "delete" button which is used least, should be moved away from the prime real estate of the top left. I've set it as the last item in the list, and have put the "Add.." and "Edit" buttons first.
We are looking for feedback on this as the idea. I would especially like to hear from anyone who sees problems in the changes to the "Add ..." button, as this seems to have the potential to be more disruptive to current workflows...
So without further ado, I present the proposed changes (with current UI for context).
Current UI:
Proposed UI, displaying altered button placement/order:
With "Add..." button activated (still need's proper styling):
Proposed UI, displaying altered button placement/order:
With "Add..." button activated (still need's proper styling):
Filed under
Comments
Looks like a really sensible move though wonder if it is safer to have Delete on far left on same row.
Having the 'add' button makes lots of sense.
Also just like to flag my desire/intention to get a working solution for an 'add CMS account' button to show in place of the 'User Record' button for Individuals who do not currently have an account. Just flagging that in case it at all influences how you set up the new interface ;-)
Kyle,
I like your proposal. I agree with PeterD that it would be best to have the Delete button separated from the rest.
May I suggest another change? When I'm phoning a contact, I'm often looking at the Contribution or Relationship tab, and currently I need to click the Summary tab to get the number, and then click to go back to the tab that's relevant to the phone discussion. Can we put the Primary phone number above the tabs, to the right of the contact name? Perhaps even Primary email? (I know we don't want to clutter the screen, but there is spare real estate there.)
Ken
I'm not a big fan of displaying more info duplicated above the tabs, as I'm sure what is your main info isn't the main info someone else would want:
as I don't care that much of the phone number, but i'd like to have the tags and the current employer, the "happy camper group" would like the age and birthday, and so on.
Hover, you can easily customise the "frame" template and add more info (either it's directly available or using crmAPI).
the problems with surfacing contact data on the contact ribbon are: bloat, differing needs per installation. without building out an administrative UI for this (definitely beyond the scope of my proposal) i think it will introduce more frustration than happiness :)
on the other hand, this will provide you with a nice little place to drop in your custom data if you want to play with the theme! ;)
agreed that the delete button needs to be set apart somehow.
I think this is more great work Kyle. I love it.
What I did find myself hoping for when I saw it was the dashboard as an extra tab in the summary. The reason being that I often check what is in tabs before Adding - e.g. I'd look at existing contributions & events tabs before adding a new registration record so while I love the idea of the drop-down functions off the add button it would really become useful for me if I could do it from a tab that summarised the various relationships, contributions, memberships etc - like the dashboard does.
i think a possible issue with adding the contact dashboard as a tab is that it is also visible to the contact (when logged in as a user) and it could become a support nightmare if the dashboard that the user sees is different from the dashboard the admin sees. It seems like people customize the dashboard page and it could complicate that process somewhat (because an admin might be seeing a somewhat different version of the contact's dashboard than the contact would be seeing).
It wouldn't need to be the dashboard per se.
i think we have some tricks coming up soon that will solve this another way... i'll be blogging about it when i have everything a little further along ;)
is a great idea (i think) - i will look into what it would take to do this...
Love the add button.
What about dusting off the access keys ?
We have already E that is to edit the record, and others to create individuals,org...
I'm wondering if it wouldn't be better to use the access keys more in the context, eg. to switch between tabs (A ctivity, C ontribution...) or open your brilliant add button ?
Feel we don't use enough the access keys/keyboard commands, not sure how to improve that.
X+
i'd love to work out a strong framework for access keys. i think the major points to think about are:
I like what you are proposing. I would suggest making "Add" more generic so that it also includes all the "actions" that are available after doing a contact search, including any actions from hooks.
It doesn't make sense that to do the action "Create PDF Letter" I have to do a search for that one contact, yet I cannot do it from their contact summary screen.
Looks better indeed.
Where can we subscribe, btw to this blog and civicrm news?
I think it makes sense, looks a lot more 'logical'. Good idea!
The "Add" button provides ability to Add something for the currently viewed user, right? If so, I think it's a great idea. Because it is an even more useful button than Edit, Dashboard, etc, I would separate it from the others with a small pipe to show users it is a bit different from those in usage.
the add button is to add an object to the currently viewed contact record. i think we will look into the specific design once we know that there is broad consensus on the general idea (which there seems to be).
Love the concept, looks good, makes sense.
I think the edit button may need to reside on the summary tab, however, as it's specific to that form. Most of the other tabs interact with their respective data via sub-records.
i agree there's some abmiguity here: the edit button actually allows you to add/edit tags and groups (separate tabs) as well as contact summary data.
to me edit "feels" like a companion to delete and fits my mental model of where i am ("i'm on the contact page, i want to edit/delete the contact") whereas the edit button on the summary page doesn't fit my model of what i want to do ("i don't want to edit the summary, i want to edit the contact").
A parallel of the approach used on the Add button (which I like) might be to have Edit > (same list as Add) > list of specific available objects of selected type. Eg Edit > Membership > 2010 full membership | 2009 full membership | 2008 student membership. I think this would be intuitive and reduce clicks. My worry is that it may be very expensive and slow, and / or lead to overly long 3rd level options depending on site use patterns (eg a very long list of activities to choose to edit). Maybe this could be overcome with a More option if there were too many at that 3rd level, perhaps more than 7. Just brainstorming...
Looks good but does this mean it will now take more clicks to add an activity? I'd be opposed to that.
Current:
Click to drop-down new activity
Click to select type
Proposed:
Click to drop-down
Click to select activity
Click to drop-down the type on the resulting form
Click to select type
And in fact this might break some custom code we have for a custom activity type that relies on being able to select the type before you get to the form.
Middle-ground would be for activity to have a submenu. Still more clicks than current though.
it does change the number of clicks for creating an activity - the idea being that it reduces the number of clicks it takes to select any of the other objects. also, i'd like to note that i think the bigger "cost" here is the number of page requests (over clicks). in this case it still favors access to all object types over access to the activity subtype on the main menu.
as to your concerns with custom activity types - from a general UI perspective, i don't think it makes sense to favor activities so heavily over all the other objects, so have proposed this as a solution for the standard installation. i think your specific issue could be easily solved with an additional button for creating activity types (this would be a carbon copy of existing functionality - and we are not removing the ability to preselect the activity type, just the user interface element on the contact ribbon). this also obviates the submenu, which i think is a sub-optimal solution.
hope this gets to your issues :)
Sounds good. Thanks.
Another idea would be to add a checkbox column on the far left to all the lists of things (contributions, activities, relationships... etc) so that we could perform bulk actions like delete, disable, and maybe some basic editing functions. Similar to what's been done for contact search results. I would like to see check boxes and bulk actions added to every list in CiviCRM. This would sure would speed up some things that normally have to be done one at a time.
Is there a way to have a dashboard-ish look for the contact summary page? It would be awesome to have the contact information, notes, activities, certain other info (like memberships, and donations) all on one page. It would be great for when you talk with a contact because the notes are right there to refer to. I have uploaded a screenshot to my website for you to see what I'm talking about (screenshot is from UpswingCRM).
http://
shawnpetersonline.com/sites/default/files/sample-images/example-contact.jpg
(I kept getting the "Your submission has triggered the spam filter and will not be accepted." message so I tried to break up the url to see if it would work...)
Let me know any thoughts or ideas on how this might be possible...
Thanks!
@shawnrpeters22:
+1 to this being a great idea!
Putting CRM info more neatly at people's fingertips like this is a great thing: so people can pick up a ringing phone, type in the first few letters of the caller's name, and immediately glance over one neat page to get a full, rounded snapshot of who the person is, what they mean to the organisation, who spoke to them last and why - all without losing any concentration on their conversation.
I'd actually go slightly further and suggest having 'Relationships' summarised briefly up on there above 'Contact information'.
There are loads of scenarios where you should be promptly informed ASAP if the person the other end of the phone or waiting in reception is, say, a major supporter's PA, or is a friend of your director, at the same time as glancing over their recent activities and checking who was last in contact with them.
Whereas, if all you need is someone's phone number or address, you've probably got an extra second or two to go looking for it :)
This is definitely possible, a good place to start looking if you haven't already is the documentation for Civi's templating system: http://en.flossmanuals.net/CiviCRM/DevelopTemplates is probably the best source of info. With any luck some of the more experienced Civi folk might help out on this too.
I've put a lot of energy into customizing the contact summary template so I can have all this information (relationships, activities, notes, event participation, groups and tags) on one page. This seems like it should be the default.
Using {crmAPI} you can fetch extra info and display them in the summary
http://en.flossmanuals.net/CiviCRM/DevelopAPI
(Calling API from a template)