[Gnumed-devel] Comments on the 2.5 Design criticisms

[Richard Terry]

On Thu, 11 Nov 2004 03:21 am, Karsten Hilbert wrote:
> Richard,
>
> I hate to have to say this but this new listbook design
> appears less polished and less integrated than your previous
> design.

If you sit the two side by side you will note the following. They are   
IDENTICAL excepting for the listbooks control on the side which allows you to 
change from one descrete section to another. IE this replaces the seemingly 
random series of tabs which are on the bottom of the currrent gnumed, which 
are not even grouped into logical sections.

In the screen dumps I provided - when you are in the clinical section you do 
everything there - if you want to move outside of that by clicking on the 
listbook icons you select another section - say the reference library, your 
Inboxes etc.

>
> I mean, I have always respected the fact that your previous
> design always felt well-designed and fitting nicely together
> even if I didn't agree with it here or there. I have drawn lots
> of ideas from it. I haven't implemented it fully because it is
> fairly complicated to do right.

The problem see is that my original design has effectively been trashed. The 
major components which make it workable (ie the tabbed control, the scratch 
pad, the recall/reviews reminder control and all the buttons to allow you to 
switch between sections have been removed from the design.
>
> However, this new design does not come particularly close to
> those qualities

Sorry to disagree but the new design is a huge leap in simplifying 
functionality. It effectively does away with the need to be constantly 
swapping the different editing area's to enter data. The whole place we work 
at from day to day is the current problem data entry - here the SOAP control. 
This central panel is the workhorse of this design. It can allow reviews of 
old problems, creation of new problems, up front summary of what you have 
done during the consultation.

> I mean, look at the wasted screen real estate
> in that "HTML navigation link" left-hand panel. If you want
> a HTML frontend then write one. Come on. This isn't you.

Please elaborate - I'm unsure what you mean by this - where is the html 
navigation link? and why would I want to write a HTLM frontend? If you are 
referring to the screen dump of the therapuetic guidelines - the Reference 
section is where one could keep ones reference tomes - the list on the right 
hand side of this contains the names eg guidelines, when you click on an item 
on the list up pops the relevent information. Obviously this section is 
nothing more than a combination of a web browser (hopefully at some stage 
wxMozilla and a list control. 

Try and look past the roughness of this - it is presented for conceptual 
reasons. If you compare the total screen design from the clinical dump to any 
of the screen dumps in www.gnumed.net/rterry/Index.htm then you will see they 
are essentially identical - and identical to all the early gnuMed designs 
prior to someone removing the critical components.

>
> Karsten