estate-agent-software feature usability windows-client workshop-report
Anyone who uses estate agent software every day does not use everything it offers. They do five or six things very often and almost nothing else. Which five those are is something nobody designing the interface can know. It depends on whether someone enters properties, looks after prospects or writes invoices.
Until now the ribbon was part of the form design. Every button sat where a developer had put it, and anyone who wanted it somewhere else had to ask and wait for the next release. That changed over the past few weeks.
The application knows its commands as a list
Every button, ribbon page, group and context menu entry now comes from a catalogue. They are data, not a hard-wired interface. So the application knows not only what its ribbon looks like, but which commands exist at all.
That sounds like an internal change with nothing to show for it. It is the precondition for everything that follows.
Everyone assembles their own ribbon
The Windows client has a dialogue of its own for this. The catalogue of everything the application can do is on the left, your own layout on the right. Between them there is nothing but dragging and dropping.
You create ribbon pages of your own, gather commands into your own groups, set the order, place separators and choose whether a button appears large or small. Labels can be changed, and per language, so a bilingual estate agent office does not have to keep two habits. A preview shows what the result looks like while you build it.
So anyone who does the same five things every morning puts them next to each other. Nobody has to wait for a new release for that.
A document from the property management brings its own page
Some commands only make sense while something is open. That is why a document type brings its own ribbon page. It appears when such a document is opened and disappears again when it is closed. The ribbon stays short without anything being missing.
The same button, in the right place
The second part is invisible and still the more important one. A command acts where the focus currently sits, so in the list, on the page or in the open document. The same save button therefore saves what the user has in front of them, and not something else in the background.
Whatever the active area cannot answer stays greyed out. A button that can do nothing says so beforehand instead of acting in the wrong place. That is the difference between an interface that looks tidy and one that is dependable.
Why we built it
Software that cannot be adapted imposes its developer's habits on every user. We have watched estate agents adapt their work to an interface for long enough, instead of the other way round.
The ribbon now belongs to the person working with it. That is the whole idea.
