From: Aaron Bartell
Every once in awhile I do a "keyboard and mouse usage evaluation".
That's half the battle. How many keystrokes are required to complete a transaction? How often are your hands moving off the keyboard to the mouse, and back again? How many times do fields you've keyed scroll out of view? What does it take to alternate between search, record list, add, change, & delete modes? What is the wait time between screen transitions? An interface like SugarCRM wastes a lot of time.
I've begun working on a Daily Planner. I made a mental note of things that annoy me about Outlook, Google, SugarCRM, and other calendar applications and finally chose a UI layout that combines a visual calendar, a daily schedule of meetings, appointments, and events, and a data entry form - all on one screen - always visible - in the main tab. The calendar is used to select specific dates and navigate between time periods. Days that have scheduled items are visually highlighted which requires some behind the scenes AJAX I/O.
I think it's fine to use the mouse for calendar navigation and date selection. But after a specific day is selected, I want to be able to keep my hands on the keyboard to view and maintain scheduled items, alerts, and notes for the selected day.
Highlighting days that have scheduled items kind-of shows-off the performance of RPG's record-level I/O. Most calendar components depict 42 days - 6 rows by 7 columns. Which days have scheduled events? In RPG that's 42 SETLL operations. Takes just a couple milliseconds.
Nathan.
midrange.com
