Rationalizing the Admin Interface
February 15, 2008 – 8:40 amAnyone who has ever worked with me knows that I should not be allowed to design user interfaces. Nature, nurture—dunno why, but anything that I find intuitive and pleasing leaves most people queasy and confused.
Which is why I’m appealing for help. DrProject’s browser-based administration interface is invaluable, but we’re finding the workflow frustrating. For example, in order to add a new user, make her a member of the ‘All’ and ‘fribble’ projects, and turn on mail forwarding for her for both of those lists, I have to:
- Go to the ‘add user’ page.
- Fill in her user ID, default email address, real name, and affiliation.
- Submit.
- Go to the ‘list users’ page (the refreshed ‘add users’ page tells me her user ID has been added, but that ID isn’t a hyperlink to a page where I can administer her information, and even if it was, what would I do if I was adding a bunch of people at once, which the ‘add user’ page also supports?).
- Scroll down to her ID.
- Click on it to bring up a page where I can edit her personal settings.
- Add her to the ‘All’ project as a ‘viewer’ and submit.
- Add her to the ‘fribble’ project as a ‘developer’ in the refreshed page and submit.
- Scroll down to the bottom of the refreshed page and tick off the boxes, turn on mail forwarding for her for ‘All’ and ‘fribble’, and submit.
Other tasks are similarly arduous. The screens in question are below the cut; if you have suggestions for redesign, I’d love to hear them.
3 Responses to “Rationalizing the Admin Interface”
I’d need to know more about the other tasks to know whether this UI would work, but it seems to me that at least for the sequence you mentioned, this should work a lot better.
Two “boxes” of information that looks like this:
+ +
Aliyah All
Bob Cereal
Chantal Eggs
Dilip Fruitbar
Elma Pancakes
Feng
If you click on the “+” above the usernames, a previously hidden div appears as a layover and lets you put multiple username,email,realname lines. (Having a separate option for the single case is stupid and unnecessary.) You hit “save” and the div goes away, but those names get added to the above list on the left hand side.
Now let’s say you click on “Bob” (not a link, just an element you can click on). All projects that Bob is a member of should highlight on the right. This should probably be color-coded by role. So he’d be orange (member) for Cereal and Fruitbar, but purple (lead) for Pancakes.
Say you click on “Eggs” instead of “Bob”. Every person on the left who is a member of “Eggs” should be highlighted, again in role-coloured highlights.
With “Eggs” still highlighted, you highlight “Bob”, “Chantal” and “Dilip” on the right side. A little “>” arrow button between the two boxes (names and projects) appears with a drop-down selector. The drop-down selector defaults to “member”. You can change it to any other role. Let’s say you leave it at “member” and click the “>” arrow button. A message appears at the top of the screen which informs you that Bob, Chantal and Dilip have their roles on Eggs changed to member.
I suspect that you’d find something like that a lot easier to use.
By Michelle Levesque on Feb 15, 2008
Fogbugz lets you select (via checkbox) a whole set of bugs, and go to an edit screen which will change them all at the same time. Perhaps something similar would work?
(As a bonus feature, when you created a bunch of users, it could take you to the list of registered users, with the new users pre-selected. See http://www.fogcreek.com/FogBugz/docs/60/topics/basics/Bulkoperations.html for an example.)
By Blake Winton on Feb 15, 2008
Greg —
A few thoughts:
• Is there a reason to have two input controls on the Add Page? Couldn’t you eliminate the single field and the radio buttons and just use the larger field? Adding one user = adding one line. Alternatively, a pretty simple AJAX control would allow you to hit a + and get a new single line to enter another user.
• You should evaluate how often you create one user vs. creating multiple ones through this UI. Would it be more efficient to create multiple users by importing a file in CSV/XML/etc. format?
• How often do you add a user and NOT need to set their access to projects? I would think it’s quite rare based on my own use of issue trackers. If that’s the case, why not combine it directly into this step? Splitting single user and multiple user adding means that the single user adding can include an access control field.
• You’ve got a few design patterns to pick from for a control to grant someone access to a number of things with different access levels. I’d probably recommend a table listing projects in rows and access levels in columns, with radio buttons for each level:
Project Access for c3villao
Project None Viewer Developer Manager
—————————————–
Tribble ( ) ( ) (•) ( )
Fribble (•) ( ) ( ) ( )
etc.
That has the added bonus of giving a really visual look at the access levels, increasing left to right. Default would obviously be None.
• The List of Registered Users screen would benefit highly from a search box, particularly AJAX based and with focus by default, so you could hit a few characters to filter the list. Down arrow into the list, hit return to edit.
Good luck!
By Jay Goldman on Feb 15, 2008