Sunday, May 27, 2007

OFBiz User Interfaces General Thoughts (repost from 2005-04-06)

There are 2 main themes that seem important for the progression and general design of OFBiz:

1. Easier administration of customer/public facing content, preferably through the browser or some other real-time remote server interaction (like webdav)
2. Design goals of the administrative user interfaces, ie generic and "complete" versus task/goal oriented (a good point brought up in this last message)

Thanks to Ean Scheussler for bringing up these issues on the OFBiz dev mailing list.

Some thoughts/comments on these, including why some things are the way they currently are in OFBiz or rather the intentions during the creation of these things:

1. This has come up a few times in the history of OFBiz, and in my opinion being able to modify certain parts of public and customer facing sites it's a great idea and one that a lot of people ask for. At one point we were in discussions with eInnovation in Cincinnati to integrate WSPublisher (now OpenEdit) into OFBiz, but they eventually pulled back and were flaky over the licensing so it never worked out...

The Content Management stuff was brought up in this context, and some effort has been put into moving it in this direction, but it is most certainly not finished and the tools that were meant to facilitate this application of the infrastructure was never really cleaned up for real use. What I'm referring to is the Layout editor in the Content Manager, and certainly not the raw Content and DataResource pages (which have a couple of design issues, and a couple of things are broken, but they generally work...).

This approach is very easy for small companies, or sites that are administered by a small group of people. For larger groups and more constraints things get hairy... Permissions for editing and viewing, revision management, trial and production deployments, etc, etc.

This is great for managing some content on a site, but in my opinion quite a bit of a pain for certain other things, especially things that are very dynamic. In general some things make very good sense to put in the database, but I hate having code in the database for the most part because it is so difficult to keep synchronized with other things, to edit and do global searches, etc. Of course, all of this can be done but now you don't have any of the common tools to use, you have develop your own for every single little thing...

2. There's no question that in general the administrative applications in OFBiz are VERY generic and are not helpful for guiding the user through specific tasks. Some things will guide you through small sets of steps, but for the most part people do seem to have a hard time getting used to where to find things or where to get started with specific tasks they need to do.

The problem with the approach of trying to define simple and limited user interfaces that are oriented to specific tasks is that (like Ean started hinting at)

1. they become highly redundant (ie lots of screens that deal with a specific entity like ProductFeatureAppl or WorkEffortRole, or even worse for the "top level" entities like Product, Party, and Content)
2. you end up with TONS of them in a project that is trying to be fairly universally applicable like OFBiz which means lots of work to develop and maintain, more confusion when trying to figure out not only how but WHAT to customize...

My thoughts on this right now are that we should keep the UI's fairly generic in OFBiz and to facilitate their use by writing role and task oriented documentation that in essence describes where to go and what to do when you want to accomplish certain tasks or goals.

That is the intention behind the design and organization of the "Application Overview for Users" document in the Undersun on-line documentation. And yes, we do charge for that because it is NOT necessary to use OFBiz but it does make it easier for various types of users to use, and we have a technical writer that is more or less dedicated to this. Actually, so far there has been so little money and so many complaints about a company that is not affiliated with OFBiz doing such a thing that I'm tempted to drop charging for it and just open it up. I don't for 2 reasons: 1. spite over the complaints, 2. there would be so much load on the server that we couldn't live with what we have now and would need another server (or 2).

Another thing related to this, and going right back in some cases to the commercial side of the world... is the idea of creating derivative works of OFBiz that basically amount to applications that ARE designed to be role and task oriented with user interfaces very customized to a certain way of doing things and for managing certain types of data. Creating these things basically amounts to creating forms with a lot of "ignored" fields, and stringing them together in wizard type things, plus creating special ways to view or visualize the data, which usually have links that represent starting points for tasks related to specific data.

This is a nice approach that makes things much easier for users. The "specialized" folder in OFBiz has some applications going in this direction that are really pretty good. This also opens up a huge world of commercial opportunity to create full-featured applications for specific types of businesses, or really full-featured solutions that can include support and other things that most companies need but can't do for themselves, and often can't afford in face of the large licensing fees required to acquire the access to the functionality they need.

Okay, now I'm blabbing on....

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