Reduce Complexity

Sometimes you’ll run into situations where the amount of informations and decisions can confuse the ‘normal’ user of your app. Without deeper knowledge of use-cases, workflows and background processes wrong pathes can be choosed.
complexity

All the Settings

TimeTracker per ex. can be configured for different workflows and different requirements, also in Enterprise Edition there are some extra properties for data transfer, server communication and more.

  • Left side: first 7 sections from Application menu Settings – there are some more if scrolling down.
  • Right side: only 3 sections

Settings-complexvsreduced

To learn more about Settings in detail please take a look at these Pages.

TimeTracker Profile Manager App

For Enterprise Edition I developed another small BlackBerry 10 APP ‘TimeTracker Profile Manager‘ from where the IT Admin can create Profiles and push them out to employees or send via Email. Then it’s a one-click and Settings are configured. Admin not only can set the values for Settings properties – he/she also can define which fields should become read-only and which parts shoud be hidden.

At the end it could look as easy as you can see from Screenshot above (right side). Now all the difficult decisions can be done by the admin and users only have to add some user-specific data, connect TimeTracker to Calendar, Notebook and Message Account and are done with settings.

If there’s some time I will create a special Wizard guiding users of the Personal Edition to create Settings the easy way.

Detail Pages

ListViews always only show a small part of data inside the rows itself.

Tapping on a row usually you’ll see a Details Page.

per ex. from List of Open Tracked Times there are many many properties. I tried to reduce complexity this way:

  • Using Segemented TitleBar to divide the details logically
  • First Segment always gives an overview with “Shortcut” – Icons to jump to other Segments
  • Icons on Overview Segment telling the user about the content
  • Each Segment only displays values from context – unused fields hidden
  • Adding Marker Icons to vusualize conditions (Overnight-Travel, Crossing-Borders, Summertime, …)
  • Tapping on Icons or Overflow Menu enables to go deeper into details

Take a look at Dynamic Pages, Navigation Concepts and Lists.

Workflows

Analyze the daily workflows of Users, see what’s the common way and provide this as your default – or make some ways configurable so user can decide where to go.

While flowing through the Workflow always enable the user to cancel or to go deeper into single steps. I’m doing this from Start / Stop Time – Workflow: running 1-2-3 the default way and providing an “Edit” Action from Stop to enable th user to change Time Category or more before saving.

More UX Highlights: