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Good design is effortless; bad design makes you work. Things like the door that you always pull when you should push, the tap that never turns the way you expect, or the interface that seems to have no button to take you to the next step.
User experience design has come a long way in the past 25 years, and yet confusing interfaces are still remarkably common. This is a particular problem in bespoke systems, because they don’t usually undergo the intensive user research and optimisation that big applications do. But for our team at Decent Group, it’s a key principle that our bespoke software systems must be easy to use. In fact we rarely provide a manual or a user guide, because users shouldn't need one to navigate around the basic operations of a system. Everything should be intuitive to navigate around and easy to learn as you’re using it.
A good user interface is all about the little details – the ones that most of the time you never notice. These little details make a big difference, and here are some of our favourites.
Photo gridTypically an interface will show a set of entries that belong to a particular record (what we call ‘child records’) as a vertically scrollable list. This generally works very well and is easily scrolled and read. But with images it’s awkward. Either the images are squashed so small you can’t see them properly, or else you can only see one at a time. But what if you want to compare images? It’s annoying and inefficient to have to look at one at a time. The simple solution is a photo grid, where you can see several larger images at a time. We generally show four, with left and right arrows to scroll through a larger set. But if there’s only one, we show it larger in the middle of the space. It’s a standard solution we deploy wherever needed. |
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Date range chooserIf you have long lists, for example a list of inspections, it can be difficult and time-consuming to find a specific one. You may know roughly when it was done but usually don’t know the exact date. The date range chooser allows you to narrow your search to a specific time period – between two dates, or before / after a particular date. Best of all, you can set presets for date searches, including this month, last month, last quarter, this financial year, and so on – whichever periods suit your business best. |
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Filter barMany systems offer a list view of records but no way of searching in that list. If you’re trying to find one record among thousands, it can be frustrating. We provide a filter bar at the top of a list which allows you to search using free text, by date using a date range chooser, or by menus of the possible options. This is immediately intuitive – but take it away and you’d see a huge amount of frustration and wasted time. |
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Record mergingImagine you have ended up with two entries in your records for the same customer or supplier – for example one might be ‘Tesco’ and the other ‘Tesco Plc’ – and you want to merge them to tidy up your records. We make this quick and easy with a record merging feature that ensures nothing is lost (unless you want it to be). You select a ‘losing’ and ‘winning’ record, and all the details in the losing record, such as people, sales orders, addresses and purchase orders, are moved into the winning record. We can even set the feature so that it prompts you when it notices potential duplicate records so you can tidy them up as you go, rather than in one big effort. |
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Record duplicatingConversely, when you’ve already set something up once in a system, and spent some time over it, you don’t want to have to do it all over again. This could be when you create anything from an order for a supplier to a product specification or an inspection form for a new site. We make it simple to take an existing record, and duplicate it – treating it as a template which you can then adjust for the new order or product or site. It’s the kind of thing that you expect to be able to do, but if you can’t do it it’s maddeningly frustrating (so we make sure you can). |
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Pinning windowsIn our systems, when a user wants to view a record – perhaps a sales order, purchase order, customer record or inspection – a new window opens showing the information. To keep things tidy, when this new window opens any other open windows will be closed, except for the menu. This is to prevent the proliferation of windows that can become overwhelming and make errors more likely. But sometimes you want to keep other windows open – and you can do this by ‘pinning’ windows to exclude them from this tidy-up process. They then stay open until the user manually unpins them. (The tidy-up process itself can be a ‘marmite’ feature – some users love their workspace tidying itself up and some really don't, so it’s easy to turn off for those that don't.) |
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Magnifying glassThis is a small detail, but it’s so useful – the kind of thing that off-the-shelf, highly optimised systems include but bespoke systems often lack. The little magnifying glass enables you to click on a field to find out more. Imagine you’re looking at an invoice and you want to know more about that customer’s payment history. Look closely and you’ll see a magnifying glass beside the customer’s name. Click and you’ll see the entire record for that customer. The feature makes the experience feel seamless and easy. We definitely didn’t invent this little thing, but we always make sure it’s there. |
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We include these ‘little things that make a big difference’ on every build – and many more. The quality of interface is critical to both user satisfaction and day-to-day efficiency too. Frustrated users work slower, are more likely to make more mistakes, and have lower morale. Which is why we never compromise on usability and why we work hard to ensure our systems are quick, intuitive and effortless to use.
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