For really large wards, fitting it on two pages just isn't practical. You either need to reduce the information included, or increase the number of pages. With my own ward, I was surprised how much difference it made to remove the city, state, and zip and clean up the addresses. I went from 7 or 8 points up to about 10 points, which I agree is a much nicer size. Part of that was cleaning up the records. I spent a lot of time verifying member addresses and fixing everything to the canonical spellings given by the post office. This abbreviates Street to St, Court to Ct, North to N, etc. With a clean data set, it is pretty easy to condense the listing data, which boosts the font size. Still, with a big enough ward even this won't do it, and more pages are necessary. I can't really see a way around that. For such wards, this tool may not be of much use.jdlessley wrote:The first is that the font size was quite small to display all the data on a two sided single sheet. Whenever the font is smaller that 10 points those with vision issues may not be able to see the text. I believe my test data was printed in something close to 7 points or even smaller. I know that reducing the font is necessary to get all the data onto a single two-sided sheet. But I think this need unnecessarily restricts the output to an unreasonably small font. Large wards are going to have extremely small font sizes that even those with good vision are going to have difficulty using.
Most of the customization is a one-off process, and will probably require someone with reasonable technical know-how (especially using regular expressions). The generate button is at the top so that every time after that it is easy to kick out an updated version. As you can probably tell, I'm not great with the UI side of things. This really started as a project for my ward and those of my brothers, who are also quite technical. Then a colleague wanted to use it, and so on, so I tried to make it accessible. I don't see this as usable by an average person, at least not with my limited UI skills. I'll probably have another go at it at some point.jdlessley wrote:When going through the steps on the web site to generate an output, the customizing information came after the generation of the page. There was no mention that customization would even be necessary. It became obvious after the first run that some customization was necessary. But what exactly was the minimum customization needed for an acceptable output was not obvious. I would expect a page setup default that would permit generation of the directory without any customization.
My first generated directory had placeholder data. The most obvious was the display of "Your Ward Name Goes Here". Some instruction regarding customization needs to be included in the process description ahead of the generation button if there is not going to be a usable default without placeholders. People will be come frustrated if they have to make multiple tries to get what they thought they were going to get on the first try.
I agree. The current setup was a quick patch since I had omitted that text entirely at first.jdlessley wrote:We have already addressed the disclaimer in previous posts. I would prefer the disclaimer to have the minimum as a default and not editable by the user - at least not allow removing the minimum as provided on the LDS.ORG directory printout. Having that much print in the header is clumsy. I would prefer the disclaimer to be in the footer similar to how it is done in the LDS.ORG printout.
Another good point. I've thought about pulling all of the buttons into a sidebar or a floating button bar or something and clarifying what each does.jdlessley wrote:As you can tell from my post in post #3 there is confusion just as to what will be saved when the "Save" button is clicked. An explanation as to what will be saved is needed.
The biggest thing I need to address is making it downloadable so people don't have to transmit the CSV file to a server. I'm worried that if the issues you've mentioned confuse people, downloading a package will be far too much for an average user to handle (I doubt anyone reading this is of "average" technical ability--you are probably far more tech savvy even than average clerks). Hopefully I'll be able to find time to address all of these issues before too long. The end of the semester is approaching and getting anything done before summer gets harder and harder.