As an experienced software developer, but a new user of quickbooks, here are some of the frustrating experiences that I have encountered using the Desktop Pro 2019 version of the software.
- 1) While creating an invoice for a customer, I try to type in a quantity for an item that happens to be a "discount" item. The form does not accept a quantity value for this item, so it highlights the item text (Discount) which then gets overwritten as I am typing. I click out of that box and then want to cancel that change, and get a dialog box saying "You have made changes to the transaction, do you want to save the changes" to which I click "no" because i don't want to save the last change I made, and then to my surprise the entire invoice is cleared (because it had naver been "saved and closed").
Good software makes it clear to the user what will occur if the user clicks "accept" or "cancel" in a dialgo box. One way to approach user-interface challenges for complex data input is to SEPARATE the viewing and the editting of the data. Opening an invoice to view it would prevent accidental keystrokes from causing changes. The worst is when the user doesn't realize that they have hit a keystroke and made a change. Then they go to exit the form and are presented with the "you made changes, save them?" dialog box and don't know what to do. If the form begins read-only and has an edit button (current style uses a pencil icon to suggest changing, but the word "edit" works great too). The user immediately can figure out that they need to click edit to change something. Furthermore, once they start editing, the form can implement undo/redo for any actions they take, and the buttons "save" or "cancel" are now intuitive as to what they will do. It is now safe to make a default "enter" button be "save" and the default "cancel" button be "cancel".
- 2) Data-dependent behavior will usually confuse more users than it will help. Example: the invoice entry form has a grid control. The first column is a drop-down, the other columns are edit controls (text entry). However, you cannot always edit the text in the other columns if you happen to choose an item type that prohibits editting (such as a group item, or a discount item). Makes no sense to the user, and leads to entry errors when the wrong text is selected when clicking on a line (again, because viewing and editting are combined on the same form, you have now made it easy for the user to make a mistake).
- 3) New feature request: For Invoices, it would be wonderful it the user could specify font characteristics (bold, type, size) for each row of the table (quantity, Item code, Description, Price each, amount). A button to bring up the std windows font dialog for each row would be great while editting/creating invoices. Use case: I have a list of items, then a "sub-total" item. It would be nice to make the sub-total bigger and bold.
- 4) Good job on the implementation of the Sub-total item. It worked as I wanted with no additional effort.
