Suggestion- Basic vs. Advanced "Settings" - Improve New User Experience

[PandDLong]

As background, I recently selected iMatch after evaluating several products.  In my evaluation, I almost went with a different solution as I found iMatch quite complex and somewhat intimidating.  However, I do have a technical background so I believed I would be able to "figure it out" and take advantage of iMatch's extensive features and functions.  I am glad I made the choice and I continue to learn more every week.

While my "newbie" experience is still fresh in my mind, I wanted to write down some ideas on how to improve the experience for the new user - and for those evaluating iMatch. I will post a couple of forum topics with these ideas.

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iMatch is highly configurable - that is one of its greatest assets and one the new user's greatest challenges.  The 'Edit>Preferences...' menu item opens a dialog with 18 tabs and many of the tabs have subsections.  The quantity of configuration options is very large; and in looking at the details many of the options seem very complex  (eg. highly technical terms, XAML coding).  Competitors have a much smaller and simpler Preferences or Settings capability.  When first opening the iMatch preferences dialog, it is a little scary.


I believe it would be good to shield some of that configuration flexibility from the user through a similar technique that Windows uses with its concept of 'Advanced Settings' - whereby going into a settings dialog the basic items are presented but there is an additional button for 'Advanced'.

The trick is then determining how to separate the basic from the advanced options.  For a configuration option to be considered "basic", good rules would be:

    1. Do no harm  (eg. making changes to the setting can't create problems with the software, database, or files)
    2. Caption/description be done in fairly non-technical language
    3. Options are not too technical (eg. no scripting or programmatic language, no hex)

The other configuration options would then be accessed through selecting the 'Advanced' button in the tab.


iMatch effectively does this with the File Window Layout option whereby the initial dialog (if one doesn't use the ctrl key) shows a fairly basic means to change the file window layout and the user must select the 'open layout editor' button to get to all of the configuration capability for file window layouts.


Within this approach, there are a few other opportunities to streamline the Preferences section:
    -  some items should be moved out of Preferences entirely (eg. metadata templates) - more on that in another forum topic shortly
    -  some tabs can display all of the options rather than having the expand/collapse sections - eg. 'ID Plate'.  It is a little simpler and comforting to know that the section isn't "hiding" a long list of items
    -  leave the hex equivalent for a colour just on the colour selection dialogues
    - is there a way to split up the Application tab into a couple tabs (?)
    - the help info on the bottom of some tabs is very useful - if it can be extended to other tabs that would be a plus


The goal is for a new user to be confident that iMatch can be used pretty much 'as-is' with some useful settings/preferences clearly identified but the new user also knows that there is a wealth of flexibility that can be explored and used over time.
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Mario - I drafted this up earlier and now I see you have posted a topic on "modes".  I will post this and then look at your topic - I suspect we are thinking of similar things.


Michael