My work as RoR developer is not only simple plain implementation on demand. Sometimes I have to think about a good and most notably user friendly solution.
The main problem here is to get the fine line between friendliness for users and developers. If the idea is hard to implement we have to evaluate its worthiness first.
My last subject was to conceive a way to make typical logic data filters more user friendly. After some discussion with Google and Friends I came up to use natural language for this. I refused the previous idea – creating some simple but intelligent (Google-like) search field thingy – because we simply need some more sophisticated settings.
The advantage of using natural language is obvious. The audience gets a list of sentences describing the filter settings in the way they do. Additionally every sentence contains a long (natural spoken) form of the appropriate column name.
Examples?
Show only items with…
(qd2 < 80)(request_date >= 2010-05-01 AND request_date < 2010-07-01)(request_city == "Munich")☙ ♓ ♫ ⚘ ★ ☮ ☯ ❧