Early in the life of this blog, I wrote several posts about ‘proximity’ and how important that attribute is to the user experience. I was recently reminded of that fact, and I realized that I my previous examples were too limited.
I was talking about designing a home page or a site page with all the appropriate web parts and without any of the inappropriate web parts. So, if you need to see a task list and a calendar, both of those should be represented on the page, not just sitting over in the quick launch area. Conversely, if you don’t want to have a picture on your site, then you should delete the one of those pretty people.
I also mentioned proximity in association with building dashboards. Having everything that you need being available at a single glance is the key benefit of a dashboard, so I guess my emphasizing proximity wasn’t much of a revelation. I also talked about proximity in terms of business process automation. As our engineers work though the recommendations resulting from their inspections, we tried to give them a view of each recommendation’s life-cycle that was meaningful.
It sounds like I covered all the bases. But, you know that I’ve never written a blog post with less than 250 words, so I must have missed something.
Earlier this year we built a payables process in SharePoint. People can select a vendor, enter a payment request (invoice) and spread that invoice around (allocate) to all the various GL accounts that are affected by it. For example, when we buy a new laptop for someone, we might buy them a case. Those are different types of expenditures.
I have always looked at accounting from a “money in” or “money out” perspective but our accountants seem to be in agreement with my Management Accounting professor – you have to pay attention to stuff like this.
Anyway, the system does all of that stuff reasonably well but there are a few things that the accountants wanted it to do better. Fortunately, one of the women in accounting is also working part-time with my team. One of the things she told me that they want isbetter views of the transactions at all of the various points. They have a view that shows payment requests that are pending, requests that still need someone’s approval, payment requests that are approved but not processes, as well as requests that have been paid and requests that were voided. Seriously, money in / money out works a lot better.
When I sat with her to find out what they wanted, I
experienced that old familiar feeling. The presence of that gap – the gap between what people can imagine and what they can’t. In this case, that gap separated the end users from what we SharePoint folks know as Data View Web Parts. As we work together, we are bridging that gap.
She said that they need more detail in the view(s). When I asked “why?” she said “sometimes, we need to know things about the vendor, or we need to know what GL accounts had been affected by this payment.” That made sense, except for the “sometimes” part. I don’t like views that show things that are only needed sometimes. I prefer views that show what you need ‘all the time’ but can be made to show what you need ‘sometimes’ on demand.
I wired up a 
little example of one view with the addition of two Data View Web Parts. One web part contained more detail about the payment request and one contained more detail about all of the allocations. I connected those web parts – OK – I really want web part to be one word…webpart, why can’t we just call them webparts – Sorry, I just had to say that. I connected those web parts to columns in the view. SharePoint easily let me show those columns as links, and now when they want the additional detail, they can click on the link and populate the web parts. If they click on the payment request ID, they get its details and its allocations. If they click on the amount, they just get the allocations. Easy-peasy.
To keep all this stuff proximate, we also have to constrict the original view by limiting the number of rows it contains. Most people hate paging, so I gave her an array of options to consider. All Payments, All Payments This Month, All Payments this Quarter, and then of course, this year, last year, etc. I showed her how we can set the page limit and how we can dynamically filter the list to render things like All Payments for a specific vendor. Then, I gave her a homework assignment – go back and sketch out the perfect view. Next week, I’m going to help her build that perfect view. Maybe then I’ll have a better illustration.
