The Experience Design team at RSA Archer has been working on enhancements to the records page, and today we want to hear feedback from you. In past UX working group sessions, you may have seen iterations of the records page and workflow experiences. We have come up with a couple options based on your most recent feedback that we believe will improve the end users’ experience.
What are we trying to achieve with the records page?
Ultimately, we want our end user to do their jobs easily and efficiently.
We want to:
- Help end users see what is most important on the records page.
- Help end users understand what to do on a records page by prioritizing buttons and information.
Our challenges:
In focusing on the presentation of buttons and how information is organized on the page, these are challenges we are working to resolve with your help and input:
- How do we balance an intuitive experience for our occasional user but also accommodate the muscle memory and current behaviors of frequent users?
- How do we maintain consistency and accommodate different priorities in records with and without advanced workflow?
We heard you.
We gathered feedback about the current record page experience.
Major Pain Points: It’s hard to understand what action to take and how.
“TOO. MANY. BUTTONS.”
“Our users complain that buttons and options where they need to enter information are all over the page.”
“Too many buttons on the screen; hide buttons that cannot be used by the end user; not greyed out but removed.”
After many rounds of feedback from our community and internal stakeholders, we want to share the most recent iterations of the record page with you. In this round we focused more on the workflow experience and provided an experience that helps the user understand what to do next with minimal confusion.
The designs you are about to see are prototyped design concepts. Actual experiences may vary.
Records page without a workflow:
We have two options for workflow experiences we’d like you to weigh in on. Please fill out the survey at the end of this post.
OPTION A:
We have placed “Save” and “Save and Close” options under the “Actions” dropdown. The number of potential workflow actions can be as high as 10, so we wanted to minimize the noise on the page and provide an easier way to scan workflow options in a vertical menu. We placed saving options under the same menu at the end of the list and provided additional context for the end user. We labeled and grouped actions that advanced the record in the workflow, and options that did not advance the record (Save and Save and Close).
OPTION B:
We have placed the workflow action drop down first because it is the primary button. We are displaying “Save” and “Save and Close” after the workflow visualization and have styled it as a secondary button. Additionally, we included messaging that helps users understand that “Save” and “save and close” do not advance the record in the workflow.
We value your input and would like to hear your thoughts on these designs. Again, here are different designs you just saw:
Option A displays save buttons under the actions drop down
Option B displays the save buttons outside the actions dropdown
Please fill out this short survey:
Records page and workflow user experience feedback Survey
Originally posted on April 30, 2019 in the Archer Community.
Comments
9 comments
Hello
not sure it's a good idea to separate EDIT/VIEW and SAVE / SAVE&CLOSE buttons, as they are at the same level of interaction with the record.
Maybe another way to address this requirement is to have a user setting allowing to get icons for these buttons instead of the current full name display which takes some place. The full name could still appear when moving the mouse over the buttons. Users would decide which button display they prefer.
Power users would probably prefer the icons mode but I guess that if the icons are sufficiently recognizable other users would adopt them as well.
Originally posted on June 10, 2019.
Van,
I really like the addition of the green icons that indicate what stage the record is in the workflow because whenever I'm working on a record I have to take time to search and analyze from the other tabs (Review & Comments) where things are in the workflow.
The survey is closed when I clicked the link, but I prefer Option B.
Thanks,
Colin
Originally posted on August 22, 2019.
Thanks for the comment Jean-Louis!
We have heard a lot of similar feedback around the placement and hierarchy of the edit/view and save/save and close buttons. We are continuing to look for ways to improve this experience so we will certainly take this into account. - Van
Originally posted on June 11, 2019.
Thanks for your feedback Colin! We really appreciate this kind of context from the community and we've heard similar feedback. We are continuing to look for ways to improve this experience, so stay tuned!
Originally posted on August 22, 2019.
Van,
I prefer option B, because always we are not take decision in single shot. we need to fill some fields then obviously we need to save record without take decision so option B will be more effective then option A.
Workflow stage indicator is good idea every one can understand easily.
Originally posted on October 24, 2019.
Hello,
I had the opportunity to work with version 6.7 P2 on a questionnaire record.
Interaction with the record is driven by a toggle button which looks like this:
In fact these pictures reflect the current state of the record, and this could be quite confusing as users may believe you should click on it to get the right state, like you have to click for Save or Save and Close.
With the same idea of a toggle button, it could be interesting to display pictures like these ones:
I believe this would remove any ambiguity without changing the approach.
Originally posted on January 6, 2020.
Hi Jean-Louis,
Thanks for taking the time to share your feedback! This is an age old usability question: Do you show the state you're in as active, or do you show the item that's available to click on as active? Ultimately, we chose the former but definitely understand how there might be confusion. We'll explore other ways to make this clearer. Please continue to share your feedback as more and more users get their hands on this records experience! Thanks, again!
Originally posted on January 6, 2020.
Hi there,
How I can activate the visualisation of the workflow state (as it shown above)?
Originally posted on March 6, 2020.
Hi Alexandros,
First, make sure you are on 6.7 and using Advanced Workflow. Here are the directions from our help documentation:
"If you want the system to record Advanced Workflow audit information in a history log field and show tracking information within a record, do the following: 1) In the Audit Settings section of the Properties Panel, select Enable Workflow Auditing.
2) Note: If you disable Enable Workflow Auditing, the advanced workflow audit information is deleted from the history log, but not immediately. The information is deleted the next time the ContentWorkflowAuditCleanup job runs."
If you want to know more, search for "Building Advanced Workflows" in the help section of your Archer instance.
Thanks!
Van
Originally posted on March 6, 2020.
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