Phil Oye

More about navigation

We developed four different ways to navigate: “All Screens”, “Tasks”, “Favorites”, and “Search”.

All Screens

The primary method is menu-based and allows users to browse to any screen in the system without memorizing codes. This was accomplished by grouping the screens into applications and screen types. The user chooses the appropriate application, once chosen the screen type menu populates to reflect the available screen types within that application. The user then chooses a screen type, which would then display the available screens in the third menu.

Tasks

A task-based solution was designed to limit the scope of a user’s interaction to the screens necessary to perform a task. Each task is composed of several screens. The first menu contains the available tasks. The second menu lists the screens within each task. Arrows were provided for navigation between screens.

Favorites

While the command line interface was good for experts, novices had to resort to a bunch of post-its on their monitor with the most important screen names. We wanted to facilitate this online by allowing users would to specify particular screens as favorites for quick access to the screen at any time.

Search

Search would allow the user to find a particular screen that cotains a particular field. This allows the user to find a screen even if they don’t know the name of the scren or the name of the application.

Footer

Two important features of the exisiting 3270 application that we preserved were the ability to navigate to related screens and the ability to navigate to any screen directly by entering the screen name.