copy templates UI problematic

[James Fournie]

When a user has no copy templates, the dropdown box is narrowed and various Sitka libraries have found this confusing and thought it was broken. I think it would be more intuitive to disable (grey) the dropdown with the text "No templates" or something to clearly indicate there are no templates.

I post this tickets also in the hopes that it will be fixed or improved if at one point the copy editor templates are unified with the Acq/Serials copy templates

[Josh Stompro (u-launchpad-stompro-org)]

Along with the original issue reported in this ticket, I would like to add some other thoughts about the Copy Editor Templates UI.

I haven't looked at the web client copy editor yet, so I don't know if the design has changed there yet. I'll educate myself on that and update the ticket.

Our staff have found their initial experience with the Copy Editor confusing. I think some other changes would make it more intuitive for new users. Staff do get used to this after making a few mistakes, but it would be nice if those mistakes didn't need to be made.

It isn't clear to new users that the top Templates UI elements only apply to the copy templates, and not to the copy editor. Effort has been made to have a grey background around the Templates area, but that doesn't seem to be enough. We have found that when a new user looks at the copy editor, makes a change, and then wants to save the change, they will initially click the template save button instead of the Modify Copies button. And this also occasionally happens to staff that have used the copy editor successfully for a while, but who are not fully paying attention to what they are doing.

One idea to make it more intuitive would be to both make the button text more verbose and to hide the template modification buttons unless an "Edit Templates" button is pressed.

So instead of
"Templates: Dropdown" "Apply" "Delete" "Import" "Export" "Save" "Reset"
it could be
"Templates: Dropdown" "Apply Template" "Edit Templates" "Reset"

I'm by no means a UI designer though, I'm sure there is a better way to do this.
Thanks
Josh

[Kathy Lussier (klussier)]

Following up on Josh's comment on how it works in the web client, when the user has no copy templates, the dropdown no longer gets skinny, but it doesn't display a "No templates" text to make it clear why there are no templates when you click on the dropdown. Therefore, I think we might still want to consider this new enhancement for the web client.

Otherwise, the creation, editing, and saving of copy templates is done in an entirely different tab of the copy editor that will probably lessen confusion among new staff. I still think there's room for improvement (our people would love to see the creation of copy templates available entirely outside of the copy editor and perhaps merged with the serials copy templates interface). However, I think any suggested changes to this interface should be based off of the new UI in the web client since we don't really want to make UI changes to the xul client at this time.

[Kyle Huckins (khuckins)]

Noting that this is still the case in Evergreen 3.6

[Terran McCanna (tmccanna)]

This (ie, it's not clear that there are no existing templates to choose from) is still the case in Evergreen 3.8 release candidate in the newer Angular interface.

[Josh Stompro (u-launchpad-stompro-org)]

The Angular Volcopy editor doesn't put copy template editing into a different tab, so it goes back to looking like the XUL editor again, with all the Template editing options visible by default again.
Josh