[JMUnderwood]

SuiteBundler is an incredible new (as of Ver 2007) capability in NetSuite that brings NetSuite much closer to providing a proper environment for development and testing. For over 15 years, professional developers have always maintained at least three (3) versions of their application at any point in time:The current live, production version in use with real data by the end-users
A TEST version that the client is testing to evaluate whether or not is is ready to become the PRODUCTION version
The DEVELOPMENT version that each developer uses to develop the next released version.
Prior to SuiteBundler, there was NO way to COPY the code from the approved TEST version to the PRODUCTION version.

So, SuiteBundler is a giant step towards bringing NetSuite into par with most of the world’s development environments.

Now that I have had an opportunity to use SuiteBundler in a real-world situation, I find it has basic design flaws in the UI:The selection of objects to be included in the bundle is listed, NOT in alphabetic order as one would expect, but in random order.So if one has a large number of objects, like Saved Searches, then it becomes very time consuming to locate and select the objects to be included

.

The WIDTH of the selection list (“Choose Objects”) is FIXED WIDTH, and fairly narrow.Thus any objects whose name/title are more than 25-30 characters can NOT be clearly identified
This is a real problem with Reports and Searches that may have a number of them with very similar names except for the last few characters
Especially Reports. Since NetSuite does NOT provide selectable filters on the footer of the report (like Searches), we often have many reports with the same name except the last 5 or 6 characters

.

The “Bundle Contents” window has similar problemsAlthough the selected objects are shown alphabetic within a category, the column is FIXED width and so on can NOT clearly identify that the correct object has been selected.

These problems make it very frustrating when having to deal with a long list of objects to select from. Please give more consideration to this type of design element in the future.

==========================

EDIT: I have edited my original post, which was, as pointed out below too harsh given the relatively minor flaws. I made the mistake of posting this late at night after a very frustrating day. My apologies to anyone who was offended.
This is a cached copy. Click here to see the original post.

[Luke]

RE: Design Flaws in SuiteBundler UI

IMO, this represents a failure in both internal design review and internal testing. From my experience as a former developer of windows apps, client-server apps, and web apps, this kind of UI would never have even come out of the developer of that section. Much less made it past any kind of decent design review and testing.

This is a pretty harsh statement and vast generalization considering the very minor flaws you point out are just simple bugs that need to be addressed and not failures in the overal UI design. I am looking into the sorting bug in the search list, and the lack of text wrapping for your long report/search labels.

As Evan pointed out in a seperate thread, we now have an experienced group of people focused on general UI and user experience issues. We appreciate everyone’s constructive criticism and feedback.

[evan_goldberg]

RE: Design Flaws in SuiteBundler UI

Jim I have to agree with Luke your post is a bit over the top given the issues you point out. And I would like to point out that we have had lots of use of SuiteBundler already and this is the first complaints we’ve heard on this issues, so they don’t appear to be major obstacles.

We will however look at those issues though and continue to work to improve the SuiteBundler UI.

Thanks,

-e

[Luke]

RE: Design Flaws in SuiteBundler UI

Jim –

Both of the defects you pointed out are now fixed in the 2007.1 code line and will be released next week.

1. Saved Search objects not displaying in alphabetical order

2. Long object names being cut off and not wrapping

Let me know if you run into any other defects.

– Luke

[JMUnderwood]

RE: Design Flaws in SuiteBundler UI

Luke and Evan,

My apologies. The post was too harsh given the problem. I have edited the original post accordingly.

Thanks for making a fix so quickly. It’s a minor thing, but it will really help.

[Luke]

RE: Design Flaws in SuiteBundler UI

No problem Jim. Please keep the great feedback coming.

[Author]

Posts