Spotfire Ideas Portal
Why hide the transform data popup when new data is loaded? Why hide it behind the Import Data link?
Preamble:
Import implies a data load operation, which it does not do - it allows you to add transformations. Shouldn't it be renamed to "Transform"? Data is not imported until you press the "OK" button. Let's not water this terminology down, please.
Now...
Why hide something so important from the user? Why make the user go through the extra step to open the Import dialog because it might hide a row append operation that Spotfire 10.3 performs on the user's behalf because it sees that the new data resembles some existing data in the file already ? Spotfire is making an assumption here, and not really exposing it to the user. Consequently, a data table load might not create a data table, but add rows to another data table. And that should not happen unless the user wants it to happen.
If Spotfire is going to choose to append rows to an existing table, then it really needs to make the user aware of this BEFORE it happens. Show the transform steps to be taken a priori. Add descriptive text and the selector to allow the user to take action. Spotfire is trying to do too much here, and adds another barrier to getting data into the product.
If it's something that I'm now going to have to do all the time just to be sure that Spotfire does not do something on my behalf that I don't want it to do, Spotfire should just show the extra steps that it plans on taking without hiding it!
Really disappointed with the new data load workflow.
JP
| Implemented in | 10.10 |
Hi JP, thanks again for your feedback. We'll definitely take this into consideration again!
Hi Thomas,
I'm looking at 10.10 improvements, and it still misses the mark. Why can't you just open the import dialog details to explicitly show the user what the recommendation is (it is much clearer than "making the lightbulb larger and changing the label", really)? You can't miss that. You folks are taking half-measures here, and it's to the detriment of the product quality. I can appreciate the goal to be minimal and clean but in this case it's doing harm.
thanks,
JP
Thanks Thomas. That sounds good, I think, but at the moment it is a big hindrance. It's getting in the way, and doing things that the user does not know about. The current behavior is unacceptable. It's wrong.
JP
Hi JP. Thanks for excellent feedback. The adding data workflow is new in 10.x but it's in our direction to make it more clear when recommendations are available, how to accept and reject them and to make it easier to find all the manual prefernces available.