Cubenot Blog

Reports Ruin Requirements Management

Doug Feuerbach — Sun, 18 May 2008 23:20:32 GMT

Something we see often in requirements management software is the use of hierarchical trees for presenting requirements. Hierarchical trees are cumbersome not only because you’re constantly collapsing and expanding ‘nodes’ to find what you need, but you have to keep track of where you are. Why are hierarchical views used so often?

I think fault lies with the preeminence given to the hardcopy requirements document, largely because of its contractual importance in governments and large organizations, or aging cultural values. As a result, a lot of requirements management software unwittingly strives for the usability of a stack of paper, and is relegated to being a complex book-keeping and report generating utility. While reports may be important, they have nothing to do with using the requirements to get work done, and getting work done is SamePage’s sweet spot.

SamePage is work-driven. It strives to keep you focused on the information that is most relevant to your work by organizing everything into three horizontal panes for Base Requirements, Derived Requirements and Tasks. Each pane gives you intuitive filtering to isolate the requirements or tasks you care about, and you may jump to a set of related requirements or tasks in their respective pane by ‘sliding’. In Simple Mode, you have a single Requirements pane, and everything is at your fingertips without sliding.

In large projects, you’re likely to spend most of your time in the Derived Requirements and Tasks panes if you’re a software developer. If you’re doing requirements analysis, you’ll spend a lot of time between the Base and Derived Requirements panes. You can jump between panes while retaining the context of the requirement or task by clicking on a nubbin (nubbins are experimental and will likely be tweaked a bit)–this approach gets you to the information you need quickly without having to remember where you are. Watch the video snippet below to see this in action and see how we avoided the abominable tree widget.

SamePage Beta Feedback - Batch Update

Jim Garvin — Sun, 18 May 2008 21:20:06 GMT

In my last post, I talked about popdowns, and how they turned out to be a failed experiment. This time around I’m going to show off something that we got right: batch updating.

One of our beta testers had this to say about SamePage’s batch updating feature:

“It is the best implementation of bulk editing that I’ve ever seen in a web application.” -Ryan McGeary

That’ll be one for the endorsement page (when I make one).

SamePage’s batch update in action

(click here if reading via RSS reader)

Good UI Mojo

The batch updating feature should inspire happiness for a few reasons:

It’s discoverable. New users will naturally click around on things, and when they click on a requirement, the batch update controls will present themselves, drawing attention and providing instruction. This is the principle of pleasant surprise that we like.
It’s gives intuitive and explicit feedback. Only the specific cells that were updated (as opposed to the entire row) will be highlighted upon successful batch update. Users will feel confident that their intended changes were made.
It’s out of your way. It doesn’t take up valuable screen space, or draw your eye, until it’s needed.

Next up: How SamePage avoided the abominable tree widget.

SamePage Beta Feedback - Popdowns

Jim Garvin — Tue, 13 May 2008 22:23:50 GMT

Most of the feedback we’ve received during the beta has to do with the interface. Some good, some … not so good. In this post, I’m going to talk about Samepage’s “popdowns”, which are no longer.

What are popdowns?

Popdowns were the tabs that popped up (actually, down) when you moused-over a requirement. They showed up on the left and/or right side of the page depending on the context:

Popdown on the left	Popdown on the right

If a user clicked on a popdown on the left, it would NOT trigger the sliding mechanism, but it would filter the current list by this item.	If a user clicked on a popdown on the right, it would trigger the sliding mechanism and filter the right-bound list by this item.

Bad UI Mojo

There’s a few problems with the dropdowns.

They communicated information poorly. The left popdown tab gave you the id of the parent item (“Base Requirement 1”), while the right tab gave you the child count (“Tasks: 1”).
They didn’t invite you to click on them. “Oh you can click on those?” was one memorable statement.
If you did figure out that they were clickable, the UI response wasn’t what you expected. Depending on whether you clicked left-justified tab or a right-justified tab, different things would happen.
It conceals information about the row beneath it, which is kind of a hassle when scanning a list.

The Popdown tabs violated all kinds of UI principles that we try to adhere to. For instance, things that look the same should behave the same. Also, we agree with the principle of least surprise, but in some cases we opt for principle of pleasant surprise. “Oh you can click on that” does not qualify as pleasant surprise.

So, popdowns are out. Yesterday’s UI widget. Maybe we’ll find a use for them in the future, but for now they aren’t welcome in our town.

Enter the Nubbin

The left popdown tab was replaced by simply adding a column to the requirement list that has the parent item’s id in it. The id is colored and clickable. Since it’s a column, we can sort on it and it gives us extra information about our requirements. Bonus.

The right popdown tab was replaced by the newly introduced Nubbin. The nubbin reveals itself on mouse-over, just like the tab did, but it obscures information in the same row and only one column’s worth of info is obscured at that. The nubbin screams “CLICK ME!”, and it’s shaped with an arrow-esque point that hints “we are going that way”. The Nubbins are color coded to list type (like the tabs were), and we only show the child count in the Nubbin as opposed to the list type, then a colon, then the child count.

Evolution and the User Interface

Are Nubbins the best solution? For now, we think so. But hey, we also thought Popdowns were the bees knees when we implemented them. As time goes by we’ll see whether the nubbins get a sour taste to them, but we think they are definitely an improvement over the popdowns.

Thanks, everyone, for the feedback. As you can see we are obsessing appropriately. (Next up: feedback on SamePage’s bulk editing, a.k.a. batch updates)

Early Feedback from the SamePage Beta

Jim Garvin — Tue, 13 May 2008 20:38:47 GMT

The SamePage Beta has been going on for a few weeks now and we’ve received some great feedback. Special thanks to Chris Murphy, Pat George, and Ryan McGeary for their thoughtful and abundant feedback.

I’m going to do a few separate posts, each one covering a specific instance of feedback and what we did to address what we thought was some very fine criticism. The intent is to give a little insight into how we approach UI design, feature/simplicity trade-offs, and our thought processes in general when it comes to building a product we want our customers to love using.

Announcing SamePage Beta

Doug Feuerbach — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 21:51:59 GMT

Last Thursday we launched SamePage, our hosted service that provides an easy, collaborative way to manage, evolve and track project requirements. Requirements are anything that needs to be done or adhered to in order for a project to be successful. We use SamePage internally to plan and track its own features, assign milestones or builds, set priorities and keep track of who is working on what.

Before SamePage, we looked at third-party requirements management software, but nothing hit the mark. Our disappointments included cumbersome user interfaces, feature bloat, and token support for collaboration. So we set out to build something that keeps things simple and does what most people want, most of the time. Along the way, we came up with a few elegant navigation and editing features.

Since the launch, we’ve received insightful suggestions, a few minor bug reports and welcome compliments. We look forward to more of everything!