A Narrower Gap

Overview: We’ve changed the way we handle qualifications, making it easier to learn and easier to use, and it all has to do with something called modality.

Let me tell you something you’ve had to do a hundred times today that bugged you and and you didn’t know why: the software you use interrupted your flow in order to ask you a question. Maybe it was asking you if you’re sure you want to delete something, or maybe it was asking you for a file to open, or maybe it was just giving you a warning.

Any window which doesn’t let you do anything else until you close the window is called “modal”. A window which lets you continue to interact with the rest of the application is called “modeless”.
Now, far be it for me to tell you that modal windows are bad. Quite to the contrary, there are many times when a program really doesn’t have a choice: asking for a filename to open, for instance. However, reducing modal windows and instead using modeless methods can make for a less jarring, more pleasing experience for the user.

I recently came across this blog entry which talks about an entirely modeless application, with some very clever ways of getting around things which are typically modal: using menus for “are you sure” type questions and information bars for warnings are great ideas.

This kind of got my creative juices flowing. Surely there were places in Humanis which could benefit from being less intrusive and not require pop up dialog boxes! And, indeed, there are. I didn’t go looking for them, really, and the one that I want to talk about today just sort of came out of a brainstorming session that I had with James.

The upshot of this is that we’ve changed qualifications.

Existing users, please don’t panic, you’re going to love it.

Tracking skills in any software application isn’t easy. You simply need to look at ten staffing software products and you’ll see ten different ways to do it, all of them with their strengths and weaknesses. With Humanis, we came up with what we think is the most flexible way of handling skills, and we’ve done it the same way since the first Windows version, eight years ago.

Humanis uses a completely user-definable hierarchy of categories and skills which can then be applied to applicants (and clients, contact and job orders). For as long as we’ve been in Windows, we’ve used a pretty standard two-tree-view dialog to perform this:

To use it, you select the qualification on the left hand side, and then press the -> button to add it to the applicant. Lather, rinse, repeat. Now, you can use the quick search at the bottom to find a particular skill, and when you click the -> button it automatically goes to the next skill in the list, and those things make it easier to maneuver through the dialog and add skills quickly. However, it’s still a little bit, well, cumbersome.

We display the qualifications in a stretched out manner, to maximize the information available on the screen. It looks like this:

As you can see, we get a *lot* of information in a very small space, which is great. However, this means there are two views of the qualifications: the tree in the modal dialog, and the view above. Trying to explain this relation is kind of tough to both prospects and new clients during training.

So, we have a situation where the software interrupts the user when they want to edit skills, and we have two related views of information without any obvious connection between them. I wanted to come up with a method that more directly showed the relationship between the hierarchy and the display, as well as stayed out of the way of the user as much as possible.

The first thing I did was make a sliding edit area at the side of the qualifications display, with the qualifications tree in it. To the tree I’ve added check boxes and radio buttons, so that instead of having to move the skills from one box to another, you merely check off the ones that you want. Finally, there is an instant result: the display beside the tree updates as soon as you check off the skill, so you get an immediate sense of how you’ve affected this person’s skills.

This isn’t just a one way thing, either! The display component is interactive - you can click on an item in the display and it will select that skill on the tree view. You can also right-click on the item to either delete it (effectively unchecking it) or add a note to it.

Let me tell you - screenshots don’t do it justice! You need to see this in action to really see how dramatic a change it is, so:

Click Here to see a quick movie, showing it off.

(Edit: We’ve updated the movie to show a much more recent build, and you’ll notice that it’s come a long way! This is very close to how it will look in the 8.1 release).

We were all quite surprised at how effective this change was, so it was a no-brainer for us to add it into the 8.1 release of Humanis. New users will pick up the concepts more quickly, and experienced users should have no problems understanding the change because the system, fundamentally, is the same as it always was - just modeless.