FWIW, I really like this conversation. I am not a user experience expert at all, but I can tell you that I am a technical person and I get lost sometimes in ERPNext. I am constantly working to help my users understand how to navigate around the tool to find what they need. Global search is not the panacea here. Good software should not require a complex procedure manual! Users should be able to intuitively find what they need. If this new desktop/navigation approach does that one thing it will be worth all the effort.
One thing that really bugs me in ERPNext around this topic is list pagination. The more button is horrible. We need true list pagination. I also want to be able to quickly move from record to record in a list. Once I set a filter on a list and open the first record, I should have a next record/previous record option on the page so I can just move from one to one if I want. In the list we need real pagination like what github has or other well designed applications. Keep the “number of records to show” on the left, but turn the right into pagination.
I also want to make it easier to hide things from users. For example everyone has “access” to read the company and fiscal year records, but they don’t need to see them in navigation! It just creates noise to the user. Based on roles or groups, as an admin I should be able to set what people see to minimize noise. Just cause you have read access to a doctype, does not mean it needs to show in navigation to the average user.
I absolutely agree with this but I also don’t think that the current approach of relying solely on mobile responsiveness is the way to go! This is an ERP with several different kinds of pages, layouts, reports, documents etc. We need to start looking into building native mobile applications with native elements that mobile users all over the world have become used to
This is why I’m particularly thankful for the foundational work being done by @revant_one and other members of his team in this area. I hope to see it grow to a point where it replaces the current ERPNext mobile app and becomes a community effort
This is one of the areas that really requires attention in the UI. The Desktop shouldn’t just be a collection of icons which easily becomes redundant as evidenced by all the feedback here and in other threads. It should be ‘Information Central’ where we can get critical metrics from different modules in the system. This is the kind of thing management likes to see and ERPNext needs a lot of improvement in the way it collates and presents information to management
Great point! It seems the separate mobile application has been sorely left behind in the upgrade process. A vibrant mobile community would be best served with an app appropriately scaled to their screens. I think the reliance on just using “any device with a browser” is becoming problematic, but mostly to the mobile user community.
So many good points here that I concur with. Getting from one thing to another is not as free flowing as it could be.
Something else I wanted to mention is that I regularly use two or more browser tabs for ERPNext which helps me navigate around different areas of the system more quickly. Ie one for CRM and one for Contacts. Also sometimes I use the back button which as you know is sometimes completely acceptable for one web application and not at all permitted in another. In ERPNext it seems to work fine most of the time but not all of the time.
I think sometimes the way you find workarounds like this point to deficiencies in using a system. So it’s worth considering that the methods you regularly use aren’t necessarily the best but the best for you
I agree that I have not personally thought all the way through ERPnext for mobile and feel like that is almost a completely separate set of problems all together. But I did consider it and how any change would also need to change mobile as well.
I do feel though that a few problems are solved by the proposed solution and how it would work for mobile as well. As you can see from the first set of screen shots combining selection of an app and menu into t one you can tap the menu select your new page/listview and the menu would close. If you need to change modules/apps tap the icon, the side menu changes, tap the menu item from the changed side menu and the menu closes. Although I am not claiming this will truly revolutionize the mobile app, I think the solution also improves mobile, but we will have to implement it well.
Well, simply making the default screen menu narrower on the left by using the icons will be an improvement. If the other menus are all “slide-out” from there, we might have a better chance of getting it to work.
So lets bear in mind here that usually a new solution looks really nice, but you don’t really understand its flaws until you start using it. I would strongly recommend getting small improvements merged first so you understand the scale and complexity and also get to move quickly.
A large PR at this stage would take a very long time to review, test and merge and there may be some parts that could go in very quickly and unfortunately held up due to the other parts which may have issues. Also any new contributor does take sometimes to understand the contribution standards.
Hello Joshreeder,
How much progress have you gone with this. Navigation would be a huge challenge for end users which is how I found this thread. Also the longest thread I have stubled upon which means something is missing in ERPNext.
I needed some context menu for a doctype which is where the search started. for instance, if i was in Selling, I should be able to see all the reports and custom reports in the side bar and not all the module lists which is of no importance to me. Surprisingly, the training video has that feature but the install does not. I did a post of this here Access to custom reports
So, how much work have you done on the UX? I would really like to know and hopefully contribute my one cent.
A mini update (I’m on Josh’s team):
We’ve been implementing non-UI pieces for the lead customer, which is a large pile of customizations and custom apps. This work has been in the back of our minds at all times and the Frappe team have had made a few changes that would help us build it more easily, which is awesome and makes me anxious. The core issue of Frappe/ERPNext (to me) is that it’s an odd mix of text input and mouse/touch(mobile) and navigation in particular should work better at both ends of the spectrum (desktop power users <<<>>> tiny mobile screens). This means both more keyboard bindings and better mobile views.
Both are ready to pull in but have not yet been merged. These are prerequisites to the sidebar, the work for which is done and also ready to be submitted for a PR, but we’ve been following the requests of the maintainers and keeping the changes small.
@tmatteson The first looks like @johnhkelly (on github) needs to do some corrections? The second looks like @netchampfaris did not check the PR yet, right?
Looks like we got a little movement this week. We separated the pull requests to make them “incremental” as requested but as originally expected, they don’t really stand alone. Custom homepage doesn’t make sense without sidebar. So I believe we are merging those and trying to get them approved. @tmatteson may have more info.