Making the MooD Enterprise Experience better for users.
As part of our ongoing work, we're keen to put some effort around making the MooD "experience" easier for users, under the broad theme of "reducing the barrier to entry". In practise - this means "making it easier to do the stuff you need to do"
There are doubtless hundreds of workflows we go through in MooD on a regular basis. I'm keen, as product owner, to understand the most common things that we need to do - so we can put our effort where the best return on investment is.
Following some initial discussions with MooD employees, we have some candidate items, but I'm keen to garner a wider view to further inform our thinking.
Question - if there were things you do that you wish were easier, what would they be, and why do they feel too difficult?
Initial suggestions:
- The process of creating the meta-model (adding fields, themes and relationships). - the outcome I am after is that I am more easily able to create the structure in MooD that I require. (it is too hard because I have to mentally visualise the model when creating it, and I am navigating between two screens when creating matrices)
- The process of creating a matrix to show some content. The outcome I desire is that I have tabular views of information that I can use on a Model (It is too hard because I have to know what element to relate a matrix to, amongst others)
- The process of creating aggregations. The outcome is that I am able to perform some aggrgation type activity and display it (ie: typically do some maths) (It is too hard because the language of level and dimensions is not friendly, and the processing logic of aggregation is hard to understand)
- Changing Element types from X to Y - the outcome being I have corrected an initail error in the creation of content. (It is too hard as If I am using multiple types in a theme, I have to drag and drop to a theme outside of the current one, and back in)
- The process of entering data into MooD. Whilst we appreciate SAT is one way of getting Data into MooD, there is a need to create Excel files, and then configure an import. Could it be easier? Outcome is that I am able to manually enter data that does not exist in other tools into Business Architect easier and faster than I am currently.(It is too hard as configuring SAT is a step I wish I didn't have to do in the process. I would rather enter data in a tabular view directly into MooD, or paste into a table from Excel)
-
Further suggestions:
- The process of creating a webb-enabled graph. The outcome I am after is a visualisation of data/information which more palatable/intuitive than tabular or field format. (it is too hard because I do not know how to make sure the input is correct nor how to make the graph present information in the manner I'd like it to)
- The process of creating a webb-enabled "input form". The outcome I am after is the ability to input data into the architecture in a controlled format by different user groups. (it is too hard because different option controls have different and unclear use cases and restrictions - also, I have to deploy several different controls in concert to achive my end goal and it is not clear how)
-
'Bespoke' things on the web are difficult. My biggie: if you are viewing existing content it's fine but if you want to ask a supplementary question you have to go back into MBA for query builder or export to Excel and ask in there - web based queries would be great. The workflow I would simplify is "web user > uses web > wants to ask one simple deviation of a question > goes through MBA team > priced up change or wait for availability to answer one-off question > gets answer" which could be a several day job instead of a web 5 min job. That said, web users would need to know how to write queries so this isn't easy!
The other tricky thing is using data tables if you don't have a full data team at your disposal. I'm lucky that I get to leverage all the benefits of data tables - and there are many and they are huge - but it seems tricky for most small organisations to use data tables in a world where hundreds of thousands of rows are very common :) Maybe just converting SAT would be fine, maybe it wouldn't. But the workflow of constructing a data import and data lake/warehouse/store/platform to support data tables is huge.
-
Working off of Jason's comment, maybe there would be a way of creating a query by "following a link"? So what I mean by that is:
-
In business architect, create a model where you can chose your starting point
-
Open a dialog where the user can have a (reduced?) query set where you basically have two main things
A) Follow link
B) Filter on [something] - e.g. the "where" clause - Determine what information you want from the dataset you're working with
or, if you want to be more edgy (pun intended):
- In business architect, have a diagram which works like in MooD Edge where you can define your concepts (e.g. the main "nodes" or starting points) and what relationships to expose
- Allow for a more visual way to pull out and filter data (basically, you'd still be following links and filtering data as above, but it could be done more or less purely in a "intuitive graph")
- Determine what informaiton you'd like to see from your dataset
-
-
The process of handling user rights. The outcome I am after is to be able to define domains of access to different sets of things - elements and model masters both from MBA and MAE. (it is too hard, because there is no easy way to define access to a group of element by relationsships or by easy to control fields on the elements, such as pick lists. Instead, access can only be defined by use of hierarchical relationsships or on single elements by use of MBA)
The thing which makes it suboptimal at the momement is that there is no easy way of defining what sort of access should be granted to an element on creation or after it's been created. It's fairly easy so long as a group can be granted access to an entire hierarchy (e.g. all capabilities), but as soon as we come into an area where you want to split things finer, handling it is a head ache since there is no way (that we have been able to find or implement) to assign things to an "access domain" on creation. Furthermore, we haven't found any good way to control access to Model Masters.
-
On your users thing Karl; I usually manage content through queries and then in matrices say 'where query' and model masters just individually filter on queries but it isn't super easy. I'm not sure how it could work better but definitely having a restricted permissions model with partial hierarchies takes lots of effort to set up and sustain at the moment imho :)
-
Through conversations at the MooD User Forum in April, a couple of inconsistencies we have identified are as follows:
- Format Style dialogue has two different “more colour” dialogues
- Network chart has the ability to change coloured relationships, Radial chart cannot
- The libraries bar does not show each instance of things in the bar, whereas the explorer bar does
-
I like those - though a little more detail on latter one from me..
'Each instance' is shown for MooD elements, which can be an entire deep hierarchy (like model masters, except model masters can have hierarchies that span multiple groups, but unlike the rest of libraries) - and allows 'find parent/find children' at times.
Data Table 'aliases' are shown but the instances of Data Tables (i.e. the elements) are not shown at all. This is more akin to queries and matrices and Smart Columns, i.e. you have to open the group to see the individual ones.
Maybe the best approach is something not currently there, thinking outside of the box, though nothing particularly occurs to me :) I just wouldn't say it's an "inconsistency" per se.
Please sign in to leave a comment.
Comments
7 comments