UI in forms, active and inactive fields

Hi @NateWr,

We have been doing some testing with OJS3 and have one usability issue for you to consider.

The issue is with active and inactive form fields. Here are some things we noticed.

  1. It is somewhat confusing that active and open text boxes are always grey
  2. As an author, when you choose View metadata from the workflow, the title and subtitle fields are white, but actually they are inactive. Do they need to be actual form fields, if you can not edit the data?
  3. After doing a review, the reviewer can still open the decision pull down menu although the record decision button is inactive

So, a feature request: should the way that active and inactive form fields are shown and handled in OJS be reconsidered?

Edit: a screen shot from author’s view metadata tab to make it more clear. Which fields are active?

To be honest, we save ourselves a lot of work by doing it this way, because we’re able to re-use all of our existing form templates to render a “view” of the data. We’re a small team managing a very large software project, and so sometimes we’ll need to make choices which minimize our maintenance load.

I’m certainly not against exploring other options, but I’d be very curious to see this run through our user testing system. Those result in recorded videos which help us identify the most important UX interventions to spend time on. Would you be willing to get involved with those, helping @stranack recruit participants?

Hi and thank you for your reply. I of course understand your point and realize that this is not a top priority issue. This is just something a few of our people were wondering about.

At the moment I am in the middle preparing to upgrade our 45 journal installation to OJS3.0. Starting from November we have workshops for our journals where I will go through the central changes in OJS3.0 and where the journals will test the new environment before our production server is upgraded.

I would be more than happy to recruit participants for usability testing, but can not of course promise anything regarding the turnout. Maybe @stranack can send me more info?