"Consistency" Throughout Product

John Ronan
John Ronan
Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 Name Dropper Participant
in Blackbaud K–12 Education Solutions™ General Discussions
I am very often [unpleasantly] surprised at how these products are inconsistent at many levels: high and low.


Is there any effort going on to address this?


Here are some examples:
  1. Wildcard searches work in some places but not in others. 

    e.g. in an advanced list, you can say name is "%mith%", but you can't in [at least some ] people finder.   This has become *very* important this year as we have had to prefix all of our students' names with a cohort "prefix", indicating on which days they are expected to come in school.

    Suggestion/Request: wildcard searches should be consistent and allowed *everywhere*.
  2. Management of classes and advisories is totally different.

    Advisories are very similar to classes: they're both collections of students and one or more teachers/moderators.   Why is it a completely different process to, say, add a student to an advisory from what it is to add a student to a class?!?

    These two processes seem to have been developed in different companies, with no communication.
  3. In some places, there's a modal dialog with 'Save'/'Cancel' semantics.   In others, changes are immediately applied.
  4. Some dialogs don't have either.  You just have to close the dialog with the killer X in the upper right.   Because these are around, several times, thinking this is what I had to do, I hit the 'X' and shut down my whole session,.
  5. I could go on....
My sincere question is, is anyone looking into this?  #1, in particular seems like it would be low-hanging fruit.  Other places, it's perhaps more work, but, honestly, the net result is a quirky, unpredictable interface where every time we wander into a new area of functionality, there's a new set of quirks and nuance to learn/get used to.


Does anyone agree with me?    Any disagreements?   Am I missing some underlying theme that would explain all this?

Comments

  • Susan Ott
    Susan Ott
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 3 Name Dropper Participant
    I agree! The inconsistencies drive me batty. I can tell you that the advisory setup is a hold over from Podium. Classes used to be created and managed the same way. We were told (at least 2-3 years ago) that Advisories and Activities would follow suit - I'm still waiting...
  • John Ronan
    John Ronan
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 Name Dropper Participant
    Susan, Thanks for your response.


    Very interesting that the advisory/class inconsistency is because of a legacy system. [podium]


    But honestly, something as simple as putting consistent searches throughout the system seems like it'd be easy.  Especially in these days of reusable components, etc.




     
  • Morgan Kunze
    Morgan Kunze
    Sixth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Participant
    Such a good post, John, I completely feel this.  On optimistic days, I try to remember that whenever I see a page that has [podium] in the URL, I can probably expect it to improve... someday... and that as a user who is present during the evolution of the product, I have the opportunity to shape the development of updates.  I feel like the seams of Blackbaud's various acquisitions do show, but in the relatively short time that we've been using this product we've seen progress toward a more refined, consistent product.  I definitely encourage you to post your idea about wildcard search in the ideas forum ... I see that there are a couple of posts in there already but they're from last year.  If you post, let us know - I will upvote!! Agree that this seems like it should be a relatively easy update.  -Morgan Kunze (Portland, OR)

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