At PauseOnError, Vincenzo Menanno led the session on FileMaker User Experience (UX) for Developers, brainstorming how to improve the tools we use as FileMaker developers. There were a couple dozen participants, including Heather Winkle, Product Manager for User Experience at FileMaker Inc.
The slides from this presentation are available on the PauseOnError Wiki. Vincenzo shared these notes summarizing the session:
“I tried to frame the FileMaker UX discussion with this notion of little things make a big difference. Two key aspect to any UI — for end users or developers — are the notions of finesse and refinement. These links to UX/UI resources and examples were provided to get people inspired:
John Underkoffler @ TED — on the future of UI (around the 8:00 minute mark is 30 second clip that was shown)
The effort to inspire worked, because there were a number of great requests and suggestions which I captured…
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More data visualization tools for developers.
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A filtered Relationship Graph where you can locate a table occurence by selecting it in a filter (Courtesy of Bruce Robertson).
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Mini-graphs attached to layouts to show relationships.
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A calculation dialog with a splitter, to be able to see a wider list of functions.
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Security perspectives, such as a way to select a privilege and see what kinds of permissions each field has — without having to dive 4 levels deep into security dialog
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Enhancing ScriptMaker as a development environment:
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Code folding
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Gray out disabled steps
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Color code certain steps
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Find things like variables (anybody remember the tool mentioned that does this?)
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Calculated break points
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Security perspective in ScriptMaker
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Write scripts instead of clicking
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Layout development
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Ways to deal with multitouch environments.
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Transparent layouts – and a way to build augmented reality systems
There were many other great ideas — Script Debugging improvements, color coding and formatting, et. al.. We only scratched the surface of FileMaker UX possibilities. I encourage developers to spread the discussion, and continue with these ideas on the PauseOnError discussion board and other places where we can discuss FileMaker UX for developers. –Vincenzo”