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Select problems. Poor design

jeremyholton says:
I will try posting something again despite being ignored on two previous occasions.

If you are in the Overview Screen (or others) and you wish to change the date, tags etc of a task it takes you to the Task Screen.

So you make the change, say marking the task as Complete, not realising that other tasks are also selected.

So accidentally (an probably without your knowledge) you have marked several tasks as Complete.

In my view this is bad design. There should be no possibility of accidentally changing a task.

The ability to select multiple tasks and change them in the Task Screen is fine but you should be able to change a task from the Overview or other screens without having to go into the Task Screen.

The only way I know of avoiding this problem is to carefully check the number of tasks selected before making a change but the system is fundamentally error prone in this area.

Maybe there is some way around this. Maybe its been reported before. I don't know but its a serious flaw in an otherwise excellent product.
Posted at 9:33am on February 4, 2008
raymond.bergmark Power Poster says:
First, duplicate the tabs found on the Overview on the task page. Then you can skip the Overview page altogether.

Secondly, there is a real danger of deleting several tasks at once. You could get a habit of pressing "n" to select "none" before you do anything to your tasks.

However, RTM doesn't select several tasks all by itself, so it shouldn't really be a surprise for you that several tasks got selected.
Posted 16 years ago
jive says:
yeah. what he said. :)
Posted 16 years ago
jeremyholton says:
I use the Overview page to see what tasks I have on today or overdue. Its the main page I use. The Tasks page has too many tasks in it (hundreds) for me to use it to manage tasks for today.

So why would I want to skip over it?

Sure you could press n to avoid the problem but that's not good design to force users to press n to avoid making a mistake.

Actually I am not sure how several tasks get selected when I go from Overview to Tasks. I don't deliberately do this. Sometimes there is only one task selected sometimes several.

Probably I am doing something to cause this due to my ignorance of the system, but my point is that the system should not allow me to fall into this trap so easily.

You can believe that this application is perfect and let it stagnate or try to improve it. To improve it you need to understand the way in which real life users navigate and try to make it easier for them.

Being defensive doesn't achieve anything..
Posted 16 years ago
ranbarton Power Poster says:
If my suggestions came across as defensive, I apologize. I am not part of RTM - I am simply a user. If you look through these boards, you will find all sorts of places where I talk about improvements I would like. The multiedit UI issue needs to be fixed, per-item or per-list reminders, multi-criteria sorting, &c., &c. The point in what I was saying was to suggest workarounds for these shortcomings. If you accept RTM as it is for your use of it, you can make it do a lot for you. That doesn't mean we don't come in here and advocate for change.

So, yes, I suggest you skip the overview and rely on smartlists. Have an overdue smartlist, a yesterday smartlist, a today smartlist, a tomorrow smartlist, a this week list, and so on. Have a priority 1, non-recurring, non-family tasks not located at work list if that helps. Just don't rely on the overview page.

Finally, for me, using IE and FF on Windoze and FF, Camino, and Safari on my Macs, RTM has never once selected something without my intervention.
Posted 16 years ago
jeremyholton says:
I guess I was a little defensive in any case.

I think RTM is really good but needs a lot more work to make it first class and, like you ranbarton, I am only interested in suggesting improvements.

I see what you are saying. Unlike the Overview, Smartlists allow you to edit within the list. OK I will try that thanks for the idea.

It seems strange to me that the Overview lists are not Smartlists.

I use mainly FF on XP and Vista but I think the multiple selecting problem may be coming from my clicking on an Overview task to take me to the Task page.

Although I just did some tests and it only ever selected 1 task in the Task Page. Its definitely a problem which has been occurring for me but I am not sure what is triggering it.

I will get around it by using Smartlists as you suggest.
Posted 16 years ago
This topic has now been closed automatically due to a lack of responses in the past 90 days.