There has been a recent improvement to the way project sorting is handled on the user Dashboard. I like what has been done here but I would like to propose some further enhancements.
The user should be able to search directly from the Dashboard without having to first click on “view all” projects.
The UI should preserve search results while going in and out of various projects. With the recent improvements the user can now use their browser’s back button but there should also be a UI navigation option e.g. clicking on the Dashboard menu item should return the user to the search results rather than the default Dashboard.
For me, performing a search is quite slow first time around. It is faster on subsequent searches. Can the initial search be sped up somehow? Maybe by preempting a search when the user first logs in.
The user should be able to group projects into folders and sub-folders.
Items listed under My Latest Simulation Jobs should be hyperlinked to the relevant simulation/meshing operation.
@BenLewis - great suggestions, keep them coming! Agreed on all of them (and some of them are already in development) - but two of them are I think at least a trade-off:
Search directly within the dashboard: While I agree that this extra click is sometimes “unnecessary extra work”, especially if you already know that you’re looking for a project, that has not been touched in a long time, it helps to keep the dashboard “clean”. If the search bar and maybe even the sorting buttons (and future filtering options) would all go into the initial dashboard view, that might make things a bit messy, what do you think? If the “View all” button would go up on the dashboard page and loading times faster, would you still vote for putting search+sort+filter functionality into the dashboard?
Folders / Sub-folders: Here it seems that there is a strong division of opinion. A lot of people are big fans of folders, while others say it’s outdated in todays user interfaces. Let’s assume the search functionality works almost instantaneously and also more powerful in a sense, that you can search for project meta data etc. would you still want folders?
For me, if I could have anything I wanted and there where no technical limitations, this is what it would look like. The Search Bar would be my primary means of navigating to projects. It would be on the Dashboard landing page with the cursor ready to go, so all I have to do is start typing. The search results would be fast and dynamic, so that as I type the results start coming back. This way I get to what I’m looking for with the least number of typed characters. There are many examples of this type of search (Windows Start Menu, Ubuntu Dash etc). The search results would include items from multiple locations such as project title, author, description, mesh name, simulation name, simulation run name etc. Various sorting and filtering options would be available to further refine the results.
If I could have the above I would not want or need folders/sub-folders. In fact, if I think about it, my preference would be not to have folders because this is just another thing I have to manage for it to work effectively.
If I could have the above I would definitely want the Search Bar available on the landing page (not one click away). I would not consider it clutter.
