Miva 9 VENTING!

[josiahjg]

Re: Miva 9 VENTING!

1. Choose as many or as few products on the list as we want to see at any time browser scroll would also be best for this.
2. Things need to be tight without waste of white space
3. Browser handled search is best but an alt method would be okay

I second all these. We have to have Ctrl+F. Unless you have 12 records you ever reorder, edit, or do anything with, the new Miva took what once was a 15 second job to 5 minutes. Finding a record in a list of several hundred is a nightmare, even if you know roughly where it is it takes getting just the right spot to find it. I would suggest this needs to be a top priority. The engineers at Miva need to design things with thousands of records in mind, not a dozen like it seems may have happened with this UX

[Brennan]

Re: Miva 9 VENTING!

@kayakbabe, @mjstonez

Would both mind emailing me directly. I would like to preview to you the new functionality coming in 9.0003 so you can see how it is going to work and make sure it solves your pain points in this area.

I would like to get a better understanding of your workflows and how you are using the batch list in managing your store.

[Kent Multer]

Re: Miva 9 VENTING!

Hi, not to pile on, but I agree very strongly with some of these comments.

I've had the same thoughts about the pagination and ctrl-F issues. I see that you're working on an improvement, which is good news.

A related problem that I have is with the search boxes on batch-list pages such as Products, Customers, Modules, etc. In 5.5, my browser remembers previous entries for these boxes. There are certain entries that I make repeatedly, and the browser makes it possible to recall them with just a couple of clicks, or by typing the first few characters. This functionality is gone in v9. The new Global Search is helpful, but not the same.

To be fair, I'll say that I do like the new Main Menu. Having a dropdown instead of a frame is a great way to save a big chunk of screen space. And the new arrangement of menu sections is definitely better than the old one, once you get used to it. My only complaint here is that those little triangles ought to display their sub-menus as soon as you hover over them, instead of waiting for a click.

But other than that, I must say that I'm not real happy with the new admin. The pages look nice, but I don't think that appearance should be a high priority for admin pages. I agree with the comments that there's too much white space. The header takes up almost half the screen, and much of it's empty. Thin fonts and pastel colors are popular for Web sites nowadays, but they don't do much for readability, especially if there's some glare on your screen.

I don't think that the new "ellipsis bar" and accordion pages are any better than the old system of "tab" links. In fact, most operations seem to take more clicking and scrolling than they did before. The font size is large, so the bar usually only show a few links. The link I want is almost always on the ellipsis menu, so the bar isn't much help. The accordion layout means that I have to do a lot of scrolling to get to things that I used to go to with one click on a tab.

Just one man's opinion ... Thanks --

[aubreyd]

Re: Miva 9 VENTING!

Just wanted to mention that you can include a Custom Field column and then sort from there if that helps.

I find some of the v.9 changes to be a bit clunky but that's mainly a learning curve issue.

For the most part though, I find things are much better than before. Of course, YMMV.

I do wish that Miva would kill that huge area of white space at the top however. That's valuable screen real estate that serves no useful purpose whatsoever.

Edited to say that I was incorrect.... You can add columns for custom fields but you cannot use it to sort.

[Rick Wilson]

Re: Miva 9 VENTING!

One thing I want to add to this thread (and I know Brennan is having some one on one'e offline to demo the new 9.0003 stuff), but we built the new 9 admin knowing some things would be a work in progress.

So we're watching threads like this very closely, soliciting direct feedback and working on long term broad solutions to keep evolving the 9 admin.

Our goal has always been for the new admin to be faster for everyone, not just some people.

[josiahjg]

Re: Miva 9 VENTING!

I would add the following after using 9 for a few days for typical work:

- On Catalog flyout, have option to list categories/edit categories. currently no way to list a bunch of categories that I see (just New Product, and New Category, not Edit Products, which granted can be found by search)
- same thing for products, edit products option on main flyout
- smaller font size for almost everything especially the menus, for us, like others, the options we want are in the ellipses - bring them all back to the front. right now font size 16, but 10 or 11 would work for me, and less white space you could fit almost twice as many options on screen.
- fit more in lists, make it all smaller so we can edit more at a time
- Ctrl-F and fully load all lists as we've already discussed so editing 500+ records at once is easy again, like it was on 5.5
- improve search functions to allow AND, OR and comma separated records
- make record number a hyperlink (similar to 5.5) where you can single click on the number to open record/edit item, rather than 2 clicks: Click on record then click Edit or Open

[kayakbabe]

Re: Miva 9 VENTING!

Brennan email sent to you...

@kayakbabe, @mjstonez

Would both mind emailing me directly.

musing here...

I truly feel that the original crop of web designers who learned by reading usability studies and book must have retired from a LOT of web companies. Usability seems to be going out the window and "We" (the internet users , builders and designers) are going back to the 1990's all over again. It's frustrating. Maybe it's time for someone to republish a usability book. Through a/b testing... "we" learned that pretty doesn't always sell or get used the best or most often. It seems like that has been forgotten. It needs to be relearned or taught in schools for web design. if the paradigm of how users use the web is changing.. a new crop of usability studies needs to be done. And with the tendency towards communication in short sentences.. maybe it has. But that doesn't mean usability should go out the window, it means it is more important than ever, since it means the website has even less time to get someone's attention.

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Re: Miva 9 VENTING!

kayakbabe,

As one of those old timers who grew up reading usability studies and methods, i hear ya...but no one else is. you see, the problem is "who's" usability. Those who grew up on the internet don't have the same issues we have, and experience web interfaces differently. So while yea, they should defiantly redo the usability studies, but you are not going to like the results if you are over 40.

[jsisk]

Re: Miva 9 VENTING!

I have to agree with the OP. For those of us with large catalogs, the new admin has made updating categories and products extremely labor intensive.

[Rick Wilson]

Re: Miva 9 VENTING!

Jim,

Can you set a time with Brennan to show him your workflow, we're committed to evolving the new admin so it's faster for all use cases. It'll just take some feedback loops.

[lancermedia]

Re: Miva 9 VENTING!

I'd like to add on.....in the new interface, there doesn't seem to be a way to get a simple count of the products listed. In 5.5 I could load the products and see a count at the bottom. This is gone in v9.

And the infinite scrolling load times are a little slow, especially since they don't take into account the old method of seeing how many items per page we set before. If I have it set to 500 items per page.....I'd like to have that list loaded so when I quickly scroll, I don't get the Loading animation.



-Kevin

[Rick Wilson]

Re: Miva 9 VENTING!

Kevin have you upgraded your engines to 5.22? They should make all the admin loading much faster.

[lancermedia]

Re: Miva 9 VENTING!

Kevin have you upgraded your engines to 5.22? They should make all the admin loading much faster.

Put in a request at our host. I'll check back once it's been upgraded.

-Kevin

[jsisk]

Re: Miva 9 VENTING!

With a title of Venting, I guess this would be a good spot for this.

This is getting very annoying and there is no pattern to when this happens, but it does frequently and requires multiple log ins and outs and multiple browsers to find one that works right. There is something wrong in admin for this to be happening.

[rguisewite]

Re: Miva 9 VENTING!

With a title of Venting, I guess this would be a good spot for this.

This is getting very annoying and there is no pattern to when this happens, but it does frequently and requires multiple log ins and outs and multiple browsers to find one that works right. There is something wrong in admin for this to be happening.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]947[/ATTACH]

Hey Jim,

What browser(s) produce the problem/have you tried? Who are you hosted with? What version of Miva Merchant are you running? If you have Google Chrome on your system, would you be able to log in to your admin and open the Developer Tools (F12 on windows, Command-Option-I on Mac) and go to the "Network" tab. Show the network filters (if not already visible via the little filter icon) and click on the "Fonts" filter. Refresh your entire admin page. Do the fonts show up in the Developer Tools > Network > Fonts section of Chrome? I've never been able to get this to reproduce on a browser other than IE8. It could be a couple of different things from site configuration settings being misconfigured, your host serving up the font files with certain headers, etc.