Tuesday, 18 November 2008

Gripe #2: popups

RedDot CMS makes extensive use of popup windows. By extensive, I mean that certain operations can leave as many as 4 separate browser windows open at one time. Now, I'm not claiming here that all popups are evil, but their use in RedDot certainly leads to usability issues.

One very common action whilst working on a site is the switching of windows: for browsing the web, checking email, reloading a live site, and so on. RedDot's popups continually force themselves to the front of the window stacking order, causing an awful lot of frustrating 'ALT-TAB-ing'.

Another frustration is that switching back to a 'lower' window (most often, the main interface) and selecting something will cause a popup to disappear. This causes a lot of repeat behaviour at best, and the potential loss of work at worst.

Finally, possibly the most hilarious (if it weren't so annoying) bug regarding the popup windows is their size: time and time again, certain popups will open just that little bit too small. Too small to actually show a popup dialog's buttons. Every time certain windows popup, they have to be resized to action. This is a recipe for keyboard/mouse switching and a whole host of associated frustration and RSI. It's also really quite unprofessional.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Finally, possibly the most hilarious (if it weren't so annoying) bug regarding the popup windows is their size: time and time again, certain popups will open just that little bit too small. Too small to actually show a popup dialog's buttons. Every time certain windows popup, they have to be resized to action. This is a recipe for keyboard/mouse switching and a whole host of associated frustration and RSI. It's also really quite unprofessional.

I am not programmer savvy to know why this happens but a quick fix is to add your Reddot URL into Trusted sites in Internet Explorer.

Jonathan Frazier said...

I'll give your suggestion a go, although I think it may take some time since our desktop privileges are so locked down, I can't even edit IE options :(

Anonymous said...

explaining to my end users that they have to stretch a window to see the OK button is embarrassing, and makes me look unprofessional

Jonathan Frazier said...

As the other 'Anonymous' said, this is an issue relating to 'security'. The dialog is a fixed height. If IE thinks the site is 'insecure' or 'not trusted', it adds in an address bar and a status bar, presumably to reduce the likelihood of a phishing attack.

The problem is that the dialog's height remains constant, so the new bars obscure those buttons. Whether this is a RedDot bug or an IE bug, I'm not entirely sure, although a blanket scrapping of popup dialogs would certainly fix it!