Don't hide the delete button

Welcome to part 6 of our series on designing HR Partner, our latest web app that is slated for release in 2016.

This episode, I'd like to go through a design consideration that I had with the file upload library module in our app.  In this module, the user can create 'categories' for their files, and upload an unlimited number of files to that category.

They also have the option to delete a category if it is not needed any more.  The problem is, we won't allow them to delete while they still have files allocated to that category.

The question was how do we deal with this restriction?  On our early Alpha version, we simply hid the delete button if there were still files within the category.  However, this gave the user no indication that they COULD delete the category, at least unless the category was already empty, in which case they would see the button.

We thought that this was counter intuitive.  We wanted the give the user an indication that they could delete, as long as they deleted the files first.

So in the second iteration, we put the delete button back, but disabled it when there were active files in the category.  This still wasn't optimal, because there was no explanation as to WHY the button was disabled.

So we went to the next level, and made the button active.  If the user presses it while there are still active files, they will get a popup telling them why they cannot yet delete.  If there are no active files, then they will see the usual delete confirmation dialog.

We hope that this method means we don't clutter the interface with too much extra text, yet still gives the user an idea of what they can and cannot do within a particular screen.

When your hard work becomes invisible

In my latest project, I have been working very hard on getting the UX right.  I want the interface of my web app to NOT fight the user every step of the way, and to make some semi-intelligent guesses as to what they want to do.  Wherever part of the interface looks clickable, I want the user to be able to click on it and get the result they expected.

That sort of precognition takes hard work - LOTS of hard work.  Just today I spent pretty much ALL day on one small piece of functionality, that at the end of the day, my users will probably never really notice.

Come to think of it, *I* pretty much don't notice it now that it is finished, but I know it is there, and it is making my movements through my web app a lot smoother and logical.  

Just this evening I was thinking about it, and I was a little sad that all my work was essentially invisible to the end user - after all, they only usually notice things when they DON'T work.

But I was reassured by something a wise man once told me - "Character is what you do when no one is watching".  I like to think that my app has good character.

Don't change that menu

We are rolling along with Part 5 of my blog series that I am writing while building our latest web app HR Partner.  The earlier posts can be found on this site, and I will shortly put together an index page, so all the posts can eventually be cross referenced in the one place.

Today is a short post, and it is to do with a tiny design decision that we made today.

Clutter, specifically screen clutter, is a pet peeve of mine.  I dislike having more than is necessary on my app screens.  This must be a habit going back to my flying days.  Most aircraft cockpits have been designed by ergonomic and efficiency engineers to make the capturing of information as easy as possible.  Under IFR (instrument flight rules), the pilot has to minimise moving his whole head to avoid disorientation that can occur with no external frame of reference.

I try to always abide by these rules when designing my interfaces.  No extra clutter that will distract.  On the left hand side of the HR Partner page, is a menu showing the different HR 'modules' that the user can work with, i.e. Employee Training, Document Attachments, Absence Details, Assets on Loan etc.

I wanted to have the module menu so that whenever the user clicked on a module, it would disappear from the menu.  After all, if you were in the 'Absence' area, it would make no sense to have the 'Absence' menu option still available to click, was there?  It was another line in an already long list.  Removing it would make the list shorter and easier to scan for the user.

Or so I thought.

The module menu in question, on the left.

It turned out, that having the module list change (even subtly) via the removal of a single line tended to throw our test users off.  It turns out that most users will subconsciously memorise the placement of menus and clickable areas on the screen - even if they scroll up and down!  They tended to keep a mental map of where everything was, and had already calculated the minimum distances required to reach those spots.

Moving them by one line or so tended to throw out their entire frame of reference and result in confusion and pauses when trying to find where they wanted to go.

In the end, we decided to leave the module list exactly 'as is'.  I would appreciate any thought anyone out there might have on this.  Also, if you have any scientific research that would back up my theory about users mapping the screen layout subconciously, I would appreciate a heads up.

Making deletion non-automatic

This is now part four of my ongoing blog posts on writing our latest web app HR Partner.  Parts one, two and three are here.

One of the things that we have realised from previous web apps we have written, is that the process of deleting critical data is almost automatic for most of our users.  Even putting the usual "stop and confirm" dialog box in front of them to make the absolutely sure they want to delete a piece of data becomes an automated response after doing it a few times.

For minor data like lookup files etc., this is not really a problem.  However, in HR Partner, the most critical data we have is the employees themselves.  We wanted to make the process of deleting an employee a tad difficult - to be absolutely sure that they could not do it accidentally.

To this end, we came up with the idea of the user having to type in a short deletion code, very similar to a Captcha code, each time they wanted to delete an employee.  Thankfully deleting employees is not a task done regularly, so we hope that the added thinking and stopgaps involved will not irritate users too much, but instead that they may be grateful for it.

When generating these codes, we also discovered that users could easily get confused between the letter O and the number 0 etc., so we decided to 'borrow' an algorithm that we spotted on StackOverflow to generate a non confusing code.  There should not be any guessing between the characters.  Here is the short helper code to generate the deletion code:

def generate_activation_code(size = 6)
  charset = %w{ 2 3 4 6 7 9 A C D E F G H J K M N P Q R T V W X Y Z}
  (0...size).map{ charset.to_a[rand(charset.size)] }.join
end

Have we gone overboard with this?  Would love to hear from other programmers and designers out there as to what you think about our approach.