User Interface Issues

I just recently finished up some pretty cool feature adds to a lightweight CMS that I have built for a client. (they are happy and impressed with it, and It looks like I’m going to pick up another two jobs, where all I need to do is install the code I have written. Yey! I have been trying to get to that point for quite some time now)

One of the major reasons behind the feature upgrade was to fix some huge User Interface problems with “list management”, and they are fixed, but of course now that I’m playing with it, I have discovered that the new UI has some big issues as well. In particular, administrators now see the list exactly as it normally would be, but there are a few links next to each item that allow you to edit it, delete it, or move it up or down. It’s neat but the extra text very much breaks up the visual flow of the list in a lot of cases, and in one case is actually pretty darned hard to access.

One of the core concepts behind the CMS is that when you are logged in as an admin, you can always navigate the site as normal, and edit things from the place where you see them, so getting this right is actually something that I think of as core functionality. It’s also worth mentioning that a good UI is generally much more valuable than good code. (though you get a good UI through testing, and iterative changes, and if you have bad code that becomes much harder)

At the moment, I’m thinking that I will try putting a tiny [chng] div where I have the options listed, and then have that create a pop-up box with the actual link options in it. I’m sure that will have its own drawbacks though.