When working in the pop-up window to edit a quote:

The add item button and delete item button disappear when there are several line-items.
It would be good to place this buttons in a header section which stays always on-screen, no matter how long your quote is. Alternatively, add these 2 bottons into the footer area of the pop-up window, next to the Save and Close bottons (and get rid of the Delete button ;o))

I currently find myself scrolling up and down to click on the Add item button because my quote is a quite lengthy one...

Obviously, all observations are most likely also applicable to the invoice windows...

Hello Mario,

First off, thanks a lot for your feedback. As usual, it is very helpful to us, to improve the usability of IM.

about your observations:

- auto-save: ok, noted. we set the auto-save to 10 seconds, maybe it's too low. we will make this a parameter, so you can choose it to be 30 seconds, or 60 or whatever.

- disabling the popup is not possible, although it should be easy to do with a bit of coding. however, you mention it looks a bit squeezed... that seems something that can be solved simply by making the popup window wider. what you think?

- delete button: hmm.. I see. I think your point makes sense. maybe we can simply disable this button on the popup window (and leave it only in the "bit screen" view, where there's no popup.
what do you think?

Hi Germinal,

- Auto-save: I'm indeed not fast enough to be in time to initiate a search. So making this a configurable parameter makes sense.

- Pop-up: I'll send you a screenshot of my screen (suport mail address), with the pop-up window open. You will see that the width of the pop-up is maybe 20-25% of the width of my screen. Not sure if this is possible but if the pop-up width would take in account the width of the underlying window, it would make good use of the available space. Because it is now cramped in only 1/4th of the space that is abailable, the line items are organized over 3 lines each. Having a quote with 10 line items, makes my pop-up window quite high and a lot of scrolling is required to navigate between the bottom line-items and the buttons on top. Although having a set of the same buttons on the bottom-site (footer if you want) of the pop-up window would solve the scrolling 'issue' (for me).

- Delete button: I'm hoping more people are providing feedback so you can decide any changes based on multiple feedback.
I personally believe it should not be visible in the pop-up window - if you'd like to keep it there, I'd suggest changing its name from 'Delete' --> 'Delete Invoice' or 'Delete Quote'. However, I don't believe people would delete invoices/quotes from this location. Makes more sense to select an invoice/quote in the overview page and then press 'Delete'. At least, it feels more natural what happens next after pressing that button.
Moving it away from the pop-up window also sorts out what happened when I was dragging and dropping line-items to re-arrange them and hitting the 'Delete' button by mistake...

Thanks !

Cheers,
Mario

hi Mario,

popup:
I see what you mean.. however!
your screen is VERY BIG! this makes it perfect to use the non-popup method! have you tried it? it's the option called "Show preview in same page (only large screens)".

this will precisely avoid having to display a popup...

we can make the popup much wider if you want, but in your case, I really think it makes sense to take full advantage of your big screen by using this mode.

-delete button:
I agree, I think we will take it out of popup window.

Hi Germinal,

I disabled that option as I had the same feeling as with the pop-up window.
You're right - it does indeed use more of the available space, but while you are creating or editing an invoice/quote, I have no need for seeing a list of the other invoices/quotes on the left of my edit window. I would prefer to use that space to show the invoice/quote and to have line items displayed in single lines.

In a long long past ;o) I did some programming in MS Access. When I was building forms, it always looked more 'readable' if all records were displayed in a single line and having the same sort of records nicely lined-up in the next line, under the records of the previous line.

When records are organized in several lines, it becomes more an exercise to 'read' what is on your screen and what goes with which item, where does one item stop and where does the next one start etc...

I do believe that organizing items on small screens are a necessity. In that case you cannot do otherwise.

I have enabled that option to show preview in same page. I still believe that it is only interesting to see the info on the left when using it as a preview window and not when your in editing/creating mode. When editing/creating, the info at the left, has no added value to what you are doing at that moment. It might even distract from the task at hand.
When previewing invoices/quotes, it does have added value as it allows you to browse quickly without changing windows.

I'll send you 2 more screenshots that show the above with an example...

Does this make sense ?

Cheers,
Mario

the problem, as you mention, is that we have to think in a "small screen" scenario.

My, just like you, I use a big screen, 27", there's plenty of room for everything.

But 90% of users have much smaller screens, and the forms have to be designed having in mind that they will be useful on those screens.
that's why, in the case of the "items" tab, we cannot have everything "in one line" (yes, I like it better too.. but this would look ok only in very large screens). We actually did many trials with this. We tested several layouts in several ways (1, 2 and 3 lines) and various dispositions in many screen sizes.

Trust me, this was not a 1 afternoon job this is actually what took us more time. we even did usability tests with users. After more than 1 month testing the disposition of the form, we decided this one (3 lines for each item) was actually the best for all user cases.

I liked it better in one line too, but that was simply not realistic in terms of general usage.. also, just give it a bit of time.. I'm sure you'll get used to it. I am...

I understand - I was hoping some rescaling could take place that handles the proper sizing depending on the equipments screensize.

That's fine - I will leave it as it is now (with the preview in place). Let's use it for a while...

Hi Germinal,

We have been creating our end-of-month invoices and have taken several notes on our observations:

- Preview in same page has some formatting issues (right side) - preview in pop-up however is okay



- When ticking the checkbox to register a payment, and next saving the invoice, the payment line does not appear (no refresh occurs). Only after closing the pop-up window and opening the invoice again for editing, the payment line is displayed. The previous version did refresh the window during the save process, showing the payment line after the refresh was complete

- Invoice editing/creation: payment line - the textbox for the amount is too small



- We are noticing anomalies using Internet Explorer: changing figures, saving the invoice, looking back at the figures show changed data (not what was entered). Same for publishing status: while sitting accross each other, my colleague is seeing quotes in unpublished status (changed spontaneously) while I'm seeing them published. He is using IE, I'm using FireFox.
He's now using Google Chrome and confirms he's not seeing these things anymore.

- In general we notice a considerable delay while using v2.0.0, compared to v1.9.x. We see a lot the turning wheel while waiting for data to be retrieved/processed. It has basically become very slow to work with v2.0.0 compared to v1.9.x

- When duplicating an invoice (eg. when a similar purchase is being made), the 'send invoice date' is being duplicated as well. This results in a new invoice which is marked as already been sent to the customer, but with a historical date. This field should be empty when duplucating an invoice.

- I have seen IM on my colleagues computer screen (he has 2x 4:3 ratio HP screens). I can confirm that there's no comfort to work with IM v2.0.0 using his setup. The experience on a 13" laptop is even worse as it has less height then the HP screens.

- I implemented a change in helpers.php (already been using this since version 1.3) to have no character being used to separate thousands:
So 10000,00 instead of 10,000,00

In the invoice overview page, we have a comma (,) decimal separator and a comma (,) to separate thousands. While in the lines below, we have invoices being displayed correctly. Is an additional change required ?



Last question: we not sure we can get used to this new version.
Can we downgrade from v2.0.0 back to v1.9.
I still have the source files - just need to know whether any DB changes that occured from 1.9.x to 2.0.0 are preventing this...

Thanks,
Mario

thanks for all the observations.

yes, you can downgrade to 1.4.9. There's just one DB change (a new field) but it will not affect the older version in any way.

could you please send me a screenshot of what you see on the 13" screen? the difference in that case should really not be much compared to version 1.4.9...

in any case, from all the things that you mention, what is more weird to me is the "waiting time" you mention. Precisely, version 2 should be faster than previous version (that is the main idea). data is being loaded using JSON in AJAX calls which should make the process faster (you have to "count" from the moment you access the page till the moment all the data is rendered. not just the "spinning wheel" thing...)
in the old version, when the page was loaded it contained all the information (therefore, no spinning wheel), but the TIME to load that page on the old version should be bigger than the time you see the spinning wheel on the newer version..

do you know what I mean?

I see I have been referring to version 1.9.x but it was 1.4.9 that I meant (sorry for the confusion).
I checked and have this version handy.
Is there anything else, besides the component that I need to change going from 2.0.0 to 1.4.9 (any plugins, extensions, ...) ?

As for the delays: both me and my colleague noticed the same (different setups) delays.
We have been using 1.4.9 and 2.0.0 from the same setups we're using today and it is because of that, that we notice the difference in response...
I will check the response from another network, but don't believe it relates to that (we have 200/200 MBps over here and have no other complaints about slow responses to the other websites we're hosting).

Will get you a screenshot from both 13" laptop and HP screen...

the "system plugin" is in this case NOT required (you need to disable it really, otherwise IM will look awful)

in any case, the response time does not come from the network, that's quite sure.

if you want to make a test (from "click in IM link to full page render display) on both versions, and compare the time, it would be very helpful.

Hi Germinal,
I will first downgrade the development environment. I will then have a 1.4.9 and a 2.0.0 next to each other. Both are hosted on the same environment so speedtests will be comparible...

Will let you know what are the results.

I have the screenshots ready as well - I will sent a mail with a link to download them in an archive.

BlueCie BVBA wrote:

Hi Germinal,

...
- Delete button: I'm hoping more people are providing feedback so you can decide any changes based on multiple feedback.
I personally believe it should not be visible in the pop-up window - if you'd like to keep it there, I'd suggest changing its name from 'Delete' --> 'Delete Invoice' or 'Delete Quote'. However, I don't believe people would delete invoices/quotes from this location. Makes more sense to select an invoice/quote in the overview page and then press 'Delete'. At least, it feels more natural what happens next after pressing that button.
Moving it away from the pop-up window also sorts out what happened when I was dragging and dropping line-items to re-arrange them and hitting the 'Delete' button by mistake...

Thanks !

Cheers,
Mario

YES please, REMOVE the delete Quotation or Invoice from Items pop up!!!