So, we were showing a Notes client application to some Requirement's gathering analysts. One of the analysts says, the users need a way to delete documents. And I say, they can. They just click the Delete key on the keyboard, or click on the delete SmartIcon, or select Delete from the Menu choices, or about 3 other ways to delete a document.
The analyst says, the user didn't know they could delete documents. It isn't "intuiative" enough.
I think, that is how users always delete documents in a Notes database.
The analyst say that the users need to have a "Delete" action button that is their face.
And also, when a user deletes a Parent document, the children should be deleted as well, in order avoid orphans.
I think, well the Standard Lotus discussion template doesn't have a Delete action button and it doesn't remove the children when a parent document is deleted. And if Lotus doesn't do it, it must be the way... I don't think any of the templates provided by Lotus have an "intuitive" delete functionality. If it is what Lotus provides, isn't that good enough?
So, I asked Nathan Freeman what he thought, and he agreed it that the way documents were deleted in Notes databases was poor UI design. Ugh, that wasn't what I wanted to hear.
Oh well, it make sense to make a more user friendly database deletion functionality.
The times, they are a-changin....
17 hours ago
4 comments:
I have to disagree with the analyst - the little button on the keyboard is a standard for every application that allows you to delete something... Why clutter the UI with another button? Maybe that should only be done if you are going to perform some other action via that button - though in your scenario if the analyst thinks it should be there, then I guess it needs to be there.
If I didn't know whether I could delete something, I would try to do it and see if it works... :)
Thanks for your comment. I agree thoroughly.. Silly to add another way to delete a document. Seems like a training issue..
I'm going to use your comments as part of my argument.
I doubt I'll get far.. But never can tell..
As far as I agree with the first argument (that you have your Delete key on your keybord for this purpose), I disagree on the second one. If you delete parent document you must delete all its child.
And it isn't just for the user, it is for you as well. Otherwise you will have problems in some view (just imagine view without hierarchy, where you can see those orphan documents), maybe doing fulltext search will find them as well, processing with agents (updating some values from parent document) and so on. So it is really worth the time for writing this simple function ;)
Hi,
Just found your site looking for something to break the coding block I am having.... Anyway I never let people actually delete anything from a custom app its just too dangerous (users never know if its ok to delete something)
Anyway what I do generally is just flag a record with an action zDelete = "Delete"
Then all of my user-accessible views (except a trash can folder) in the select have:
!@Contains(zDelete;"Delete")
Then in an admin view I can see the records in a view without the zDelete filter.
I can set up a retention system where they can be deleted every 30,60 90 what have you along with walking and deleting child records and deletion permissions if I choose to go that far. Paranoid? Perhaps but I don't stop there, I generally won't delete them even then... I copy them to a trash database set up for that app so I can ALWAYS get them back.
Plus if you have data being updated from an outside source as I have had apps do... the records can continue to be updated even after being trashed if you leave them in the app.
Maybe that is wrong, but too many inept users caused me to lose too much hair to not take care of it. Admittedly I started doing it in R4.6x before soft deletes but I still like my way (it lets me sleep at night)
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