[resolved] To me these are bugs but some will consider them awkward User Interface issues

1. Bring up Exegetical Guide

2. Type in a passage and click enter/hit the right arrow symbol to generate (note you cannot Add any new sections to the guide until you run it once - awkward #1)

3. Click on the Add dropdown, and add Sermons - see your results

4. Click on the passage box and select another passage to generate

5. The Sermon section goes away! (Awkward #2). You have to add each section every time you run another passage. I realize that I can create my own Exegetical Guide where my sections will persist all the time, but sometimes I just want to do something spur of the moment - can't these selections at least persist while the panel stays open?

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Dave Hooton

This is normal behaviour. To get the sections you want in a Guide click on "Make a new Guide template" at the bottom of the Guides menu.

Alternatively, after your Step 1 above click "Edit guide template" in the panel menu, change the guide name to "My Exegetical Guide" and drag across the sections you want to include. If you start the guide name with My it will appear in the context menu of resources.

EDIT: I realise you know how to do this, but the title of you thread should not contain the word Bug as it is more a suggestion you want to make

Don Awalt

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/715756#Comment_715756

EDIT: I realise you know how to do this, but the title of you thread should not contain the word Bug as it is more a suggestion you want to make

Thanks Dave. That was my point in saying "To me these are bugs." As I said in the thread about Logos Now in reply to Bob, there is a true weakness in usability of Logos that presents itself in little things, constantly, throughout a work day. I really wonder if anyone at Faithlife uses it a large part of the day, if so why don't these things drive them crazy in wasted time and effort?

The number of times that operations need to be repeated, redundant keystrokes, illogical, non-intuitive, or inconsistent actions are needed is way beyond most other software I have used. Yet it is considered "by design". If so, the design is substandard. To a UI expert this interface needs a lot of tuning to truly make using it pleasing, intuitive, and simple. It is super powerful, but not easy to use, and you see that message in the forums every day.

I have to keep re-adding "Sermons" to keep using the same pane that is open? Please. Don't force me to create a custom template, just persist what I have set up until I close the pane. That's a common sense intuitive approach.

It's time we stopped calling all this "by design".

My .02.

Dave Hooton

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/715762#Comment_715762

I have to keep re-adding "Sermons" to keep using the same pane that is open? Please. Don't force me to create a custom template, just persist what I have set up until I close the pane. That's a common sense intuitive approach.

Don, I apologise for my disjointed response.

To a UI expert this interface needs a lot of tuning to truly make using it pleasing, intuitive, and simple

It's time we stopped calling all this "by design".

It does need tuning e.g use of "refresh" and "delete" in the panel menu and Eli (Faithlife) is onto the overuse of "by design". I said the behaviour is "normal" but not in that sense as I still think a Suggestion would have been a better approach.

MJ. Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/715854#Comment_715854

Suggestion to me implies a different prioritization than a UI design bug. I think it reasonable for the user to make the call between the two - which may not match the Faithlife call.

Don Awalt

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/715972#Comment_715972

Suggestion to me implies a different prioritization than a UI design bug. I think it reasonable for the user to make the call between the two - which may no match the Faithlife call.

I am sorry, this is not correct if you refer to user interface guidelines being written.

I would suggest reading some user interface guideline documents that discuss consistency. Keep in mind what is happening here, it is set up to have sermons added in, they are already showing to be displayed, I enter a new verse range and it CHANGES the selection I have made, DELETING sermon section from what shows.

Under what conditions should the user anticipate that hat they have asked for, what is available to be presented in front of them, will change? Is this consistent with other parts of the program? Is it intuitive that the program decides what sections I should see displayed, after it is already displaying some from the prior verse range? Why would I expect this to be different?

User did not request this or make the change, the UI decided to delete it. This is not consistent nor intuitive.

MJ. Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/716005#Comment_716005

Don - I was agreeing with you and disagreeing with Dave. What on earth did you think I was saying?

What I thought I said:

suggestions and UI design bugs are different things
suggestions and UI design bugs have different prioritization
the user has the right to determine whether a particular item is classified as a "suggestion" or as a "UI design bug"
the user's classification may not match that of Faithlife

MJ. Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/716010#Comment_716010

bump - unanswered 3

Eli Evans (Logos)

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/717907#Comment_717907

Reasonable people may differ, but we consider this a feature, not a bug.

Think of a generated guide as a "document," with a filename something like "Exegetical Guide on John 1:1". When you modify that guide, the modifications are local to that "document" (which we call a "guide instance"). When you generate a new Exegetical Guide on John 1:2, it's like creating a new document from the guide template -- another guide instance. Your modifications save with the guide instance, so when you add notes to sections, when you rearrange, add, or subtract sections, you're only modifying that instance, and not all further instances. When you call your John 1:1 guide back up later, it will still have all your modifications -- your work that you put in while studying that passage.

Permanent changes to new guide instances must be made by modifying the guide template (as you know). If you find yourself adding a section more than once, you should consider modifying the guide template. You can include the section in the Exegetical Guide template and leave it collapsed most of the time; I think this will serve your workflow tolerably well.

There isn't a middle ground, on purpose. I think that your suggestion of making guide instance modifications "stick" for new guide instances, but only for a short duration (either the lifetime of the particular guide panel, or the lifetime of a particular session) will cause more confusion and frustration than it will solve, because it indicates that changes to a guide instance will affect new guides SOMETIMES. That word "sometimes" is a bad word in UI/UX design, because it forces the user to guess at the rule that governs it.

Thanks for your suggestion, and I'm sorry the inconvenience, but we like it this way.

Don Awalt

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/718533#Comment_718533

I think the difference in perspective may be viewing this from a software producer design perspective vs. from a user's usage perspective.

I bring up an Exegetical Guide. I modify it. I keep using it (have not closed it). As I keep using it, the software changes it to something else without my permission, and in ways not intuitively obvious to that it is even connected to my actions. I really think from a usage perspective this is not intuitive (why did it change on me? You had to write a post to explain it, albeit from a design perspective) and it is NOT the same use case as when I close the Guide and reopen a new one - which appropriately sets things back to original.

It is inconsistent. Similar operations are handled differently in other parts of the program. For example, why don't the terms I set in a search panel revert back when I use the same panel again? Why if I change the first search to "By Count", does it stay at "By Count" and not revert back to "Ranked". In fact, for Search panes the way I set it persists across openings of a Search panel, while Exegetical Guide does not (and it introduces the complexity of knowing how to create a guide template). This type of inconsistency is pervasive throughout the app, the program frequently decides what to change, if anything, depending on what the user does and where.

It's not simple - hidden things are happening (resetting) as a result of user action unrelated to the change.

It violates the principle of unintended feedback. I type a passage and hit enter - sections disappear. How would a user be expected to understand that?

I respect our disagreement, and since you control the software you win :-). I will say I think you would have a very hard time justifying this design based on any typical set of current day user interface guidelines. These are the types of examples that I think make Logos/Verbum challenging to use, because we don't interface to the program in the same way across the app. Until or unless that is fixed, and especially with more advanced features being added all the time, Logos/Verbum continue to get more difficult to use, and users will tend to ignore new features because they won't be able to easily leverage existing knowledge on how they interface with the program to learn the subtleties of new things - every new feature is learning something brand new.

Just for grins sometime see how many non-intuitive/inconsistent/non-simplistic/unintended feedback examples you can see in the program, divorcing yourself with how or why it works the way it does today.

Eli Evans (Logos)

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/718547#Comment_718547

Search and Guides might seem like they're analogous, but they aren't. It's not wrong to think they might be, but they aren't. We intentionally didn't put guides on (say) the Tools menu, and why the Guides menu looks so similar to the Documents menu: That's the UI clearly signaling that they're a different kind of animal, more like documents than like tools.

I don't disagree that treating guides as a tool is the more straightforward approach, but it would remove what we think of as key functionality. It isn't a question of what's right or wrong. It's a question of choosing between competing virtues.

We often trade away "simple" and "intuitive" for "flexibility" and "power." That's the market position that we've staked out: Bible study Batmobile. We do try to address usability issues when we've traded away too much simplicity for not enough power, or when our trade-offs have resulted in something that's just inexplicable, indefensible, or baffling. (Your mileage may vary.) We hope that where the UI isn't intutive it is at least learnable and if it's not, it goes on a hit list of things to fix.

Just for grins sometime see how many non-intuitive/inconsistent/non-simplistic/unintended feedback examples you can see in the program, divorcing yourself with how or why it works the way it does today

I do that all the time. *grin*

I value your feedback and there may be other things that we're willing to change. I'm interested in your other examples; just because I disagree on this point doesn't mean I wouldn't agree on some of your others.

Don Awalt

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/718571#Comment_718571

Thanks for the offer to suggest. At one point I was keeping a list but I stopped adding to it when I got so frustrated about things like the Cited By Tool an how search of Notes is such a third cousin, which I think might be on the queue somewhere to make usable.

I think the real difference is software producers perception vs. user perception. No matter how hard you think you want software to be perceived in one way, if it isn't, it isn't. Guides are more of a document than a tool? That is not obvious to me at all. And I think my argument still holds that I can't think of a place using Word where it turns things off as I edit my document - it's very well behaved in maintaining context of the environment I set up until I close the document. If I want those changes permanent I modify NORMAL.DOT or something.

"Search and Guides might seem like they are analogous (to you), but they are not (to you). That kind of sums it up. To me they are very analogous. The list is rather long of manufacturers who insisted in a perception of their product that consumers did not accept - instead of enhancing the perceptions consumers already had, they confused them.The challenge is always the tradeoff between power and usability, for sure.

Thanks for listening.

MJ. Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/718665#Comment_718665

Don. in designing a user interface the designer does try to look at the data from the users' perspectives - note the use of the plural. In the business world this almost translated into one view for each type of employee task. I can see why you would view guides as similar to searches if you rarely add notes or deliberately save them. I can see why others might view guides as similar to documents because they save them, add notes or links to them, set flags noting their work progress ... I can see where others might consider them as unique - sharing some attributes of documents and some attributes of searches and having many attributes shared by neither. This creates two responsibilities:

on the part of the designer to balance the competing views in a way everyone can achieve their goal and no one is penalized to an extreme
on the part of the user to recognize that the design is a compromise and try to find a workflow compatible with that compromise. Often comparing your view to the system's view is helpful in doing this.

It appears from your analogy to Word, that your view of the data does not consider entering a new passage as creating a new document. Logos does not turn off features within a document - it considers each passage request as starting a new document. Within that understanding of document, Logos works in the same way as Word.

Eli Evans (Logos)

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/718665#Comment_718665

At one point I was keeping a list but I stopped adding to it when I got so frustrated about things like the Cited By Tool an how search of Notes is such a third cousin, which I think might be on the queue somewhere to make usable.

Those are very real concerns. If it helps, improvements for Cited By and showing individual notes in search results both tentatively slated for mid-summer at the earliest (assuming all goes according to plan). There are identifiable and substantive improvements to be made in both features, and I intend for us to make them as soon as practical.

Please don't stop suggesting improvements. It may not always seem like it, but we are listening. Onward and upward!