Kinetic Review

That is still better. For all our blanket sales orders we enter the due date of 1/1/2069. So everyone know it is a blanket order and should be produced and wait for shipping instructions.

One of our customer service person entered the order due date as 1/1/0069. All our order related reports for that day errored out since this is not a recognized date.

It took a while to figure out what caused the reports to error.

I’m confused as to why they didn’t just keep the EWA interface and spend the time making that actually work (turn it into “Kinetic”). Same familiar interface that was easy to navigate and everything fit on a single page. Kinetic forms are so difficult to navigate and tons of wasted space due to padding, margins, etc.

A lot of technical debt in EWA and flexibility of customization (long term) will be much better with Kinetic UX

That’s a failure of the folks they had design the UI not Kinetic UX itself. They tried to create a fancy website not an application and that’s where it’s manifested the ugly. Standard users tend to love Kinetic UX near all power users despise it.

It’s a resolution race when everyone is running 8k monitors Kinetic UX will fit just fine :rofl::joy::rofl:

4 Likes

Personally, after using the new Kinetic UI framework a lot over the last 12 months, I am now often sighing at the amount of inefficiency of the Smart Client UIs and the amount of effort required to customise them verses Kinetic UIs. While there are still some aspects (i.e. fine layout control, grouping columns in editable grids, and C# custom code capabilities) that are better/easier in the Smart Client UIs there is also plenty in the Kinetic UI framework that are simply far better. Including the following which immediately come to mind:

  1. Expanding / Collapsible Panels - Having this capability standard for allowing users to easily include a lot more fields that can be optionally shown or hidden on a single page can often be so much easier than having to navigate the dozens of tabs/pages as is the case for a lot of standard Smart Client UIs OOTB.

  2. Simple Low Overhead ASYNC Data Loads - Making it super easy to include additional expanding panels to provide a lot more details without the major performance overheads or a much higher level of technical/development investment. Being able to very quickly and easily integrate grids to show associated additional part data in quote and sales order UIs for example enables the development of some great organisation specific UXs and processes without lots of customisation effort/investment/tech debt.

  3. Customisation Development / Maintenance - takes a bit to get used to but for most stuff is simply so much easier and better - particularly when working with the source JSONC files directly is an option.

  4. Landing Page → Detail Page Patterns - It’s not ideal for all UIs and UX processes whereby a key IDs already known and therefore searching/looking up a record is rarely done but for all others, having the full size landing page with a full sized grid with results with async grid filtering is simply way more efficient for a lot of use cases. Having to click multiple times to load a search box, execute the search, full screen the window etc. on the Smart Client, when not customised/personalised for autoloading, is jarring and inefficient in comparison.

  5. Field Labels within Controls - Although this can initially seem a bit odd and make the UIs seem inefficient for OOTB pages (designed for 1024 pixel wide monitors in many cases?!), when customising/optimising the forms, I’ve found the integrated labels to provide significant UI efficiency benefits when optimising for desktop use whereby setting up 6 to 8 ‘rows’ of fields is easy - while also maintaining full length descriptive field labels. While having the label above in smaller grey font I find to be significantly better from a readability and UX experience. They’re easier to visually find and read when needed but can be easily skipped/ignored when reviewing the field values.

  6. Accessibility / Deployment - For the obvious reason of just needing a web browser and not needing to manage deployments, updates, etc.

Overall, once Epicor come to their senses to at a minimum offer a high density UI mode, as Microsoft did with a lot of their web applications, I think a lot of people will be very surprised at how much better a lot of the current and future Kinetic UI elements and patterns are over time.

6 Likes

We have recently converted to Kinetic 2021.1.17 from 10.1.500.27 and as others due to time constraints and to reduce friction on users we stayed with the Classic interface.

I haven’t done a lot of testing with the new Kinetic UI but my main issue is the labels being above the fields makes it difficult to read. I naturally read left to right not from up to down. When you open a screen you know the data you are looking for is in the same position on the screen. With how it is now set up you are mixing the labels with the data?

vs

Don’t get me wrong I understand who moved my cheese attitude and feel we are moving in the right direction, however, which one do you read the data easier in the above example?

I’m hoping this can be customised but do feel it could be better out of the box.

Regards

Richard

I don’t know what data its based on, but I have read that labels above inputs is recommended UX best practices, especially for mobile.

The Kinetic UI isn’t just a regression from the Infragistics UI, it’s a regression from long-established UI paradigms. Something as basic as making a selection in a combo box by pressing the down arrow key does not work in Kinetic. You can only make a selection with the mouse. It’s difficult to imagine how it could even be this broken. They must have gone out of their way to find a Web view and/or JS framework that’s fundamentally broken.

3 Likes

This paradigm has a name that I forget. This rot started around 2015, IIRC. The first place I saw it was in a new version of Jira around that time. Top left, top right, and bottom left all became menus by another name.

I find myself rapidly becoming a crotchety old fart, except that what I consider the peak of technology wasn’t my formative years in the '80s and '90s, but ca. 2015. I’ve always tried to keep up on the latest trends and mostly seen them as progress, until the entire industry went into a death spiral of incompetence around 2015, directly contradicting their own widely recognized best practices from just a few years earlier.

1 Like

I concur with the comment about standard users and power users. From the start of adding graphics and fancy screens to replace green screens much of the excitement about it tended to come from people that aren’t going to be entering data but consuming it. AKA management. For them having screens that package the data graphically is valuable to them and they should get it that way. But the push for all the fancy visual items typically gets in the way of efficient day to day usage. People that live and breath in the system all day need to be able to do heads down data entry. On a large monitor as many users have today there is a ton of mouse travel time to go from one corner of the screen to another. Same for you eyes having to travel a ways away from the data at hand. Having all menus in one ribbon/location adjacent to the main data still makes better sense.

1 Like