Hello,
I am new here and just evaluating what's possible. A lot of the samples I can find are what I would call simple, consumer-facing forms, designed to look slick on a multitude of screen sizes. But historically we have delivered more complex, business forms that often contain many fields, tabs, dynamic tables etc. so they don't lend themselves to responsive mobile viewing, but that's fine for the intended users as they will be sat at computers.
Are there any examples more like this that I can look at?
Thanks.
Hi Alan,
Not sure about the examples of complex screen but with Outsystems you can design almost every type of complex screen. What you called is complex again depends upon the individuals definition.
Outsystems has so many built in templates and pattern like tabs , navigation wizards,expan collapse and many more which can be quickly used in the screen.
You can also go through the https://outsystemsui.outsystems.com/OutsystemsUiWebsite/ to see what all App templates , Screen templates and UI pattern are available Out of the box .
Regards,
-PJ-
Hmmm, I have had a look through those, but they all seem to be examples of one thing at a time; a list or a bulk-action control etc, rather than examples of how many things can be brought together in to a single, useful form.
I mean, the "detail" example under Forms has 4 fields on it; that's a world away from the sort of things we have built in the past (I'm thinking hundreds of fields and controls on a form).
It's almost as if you can only build slick responsive forms, with no scope for more utilitarian (and therefore often ugly) forms?
Hi Alan ,
Understand your point as you don’t see any example but I built so many application using Outsystems with very complex screen having so many field and different control , multiple tabs with each tab having many different field and controls.
I did an application for manufacturing of an engineering product for which they have a lot of fields and calculations having like excel sheet.
I never came across a situation where I found limitation at UI side.
I wish I could share some of the screen shot but we do everything for customers and under NDAs so cannot share anything.
It seems like you have what I need to see; an example I can open and play with would be even better, but I understand if you are under NDA. Do OutSystems not provide anything like this?
Outsystems will help you with almost everything as you want to learn about platform and looking for it’s capabilities.
Are you already using Outsystems or evaluating the platform ?
Evaluating...
You can certainly ask Outsystems for such use cases , or the other option to have some team members spend two weeks learning Outsystems and than you can ask them to build one use case having complex UI and functionality.
Every app is different. The way your app adapts to a specific device is, therefore, unique. To address this, outsystem offers a set of adaptive patterns. These patterns will give you full control of the way your application will look on different screen sizes, allowing for different settings in landscape or portrait for phones and tablets.
There are columns responsive structure using that we can create responsive screens and for tables we have responsive tables available in OS. You can use this adaptive patterns from the link which is shared in above post.
Hope this helps
Thanks
AD
Thanks AD for your reply, but in a way it only confirms what I was thinking; OutSystems may be too much orientated to responsive mobile displays, for my use-case.
You might see it as old fashioned, but 99% or what we do is business to business transactions where you can guarantee a desktop screen with a minimum width of 1280 pixels. So any responsiveness is not only unnecessary but it really limits what you can do on a desktop display. I specifically asked if there were examples of complex forms that are NOT designed for a multitude of screens or mobile devices and yet your natural response was to explain that every app is built for a unique screen, which makes me wonder if I am right to question if it is suited to more B2B 'utilitarian' forms designed for the desktop?
you can't blame a tool and community to be geared towards delivering responsive, modern apps with a lot of attention to user experience.
That doesn't mean you wouldn't be able to develop what you call 'oldfashioned' user interfaces. Could you explain a bit more why you have concerns about this ? What is it about what you have seen so far, that you feel would not be useable for your purposes?
For example, the fact that apps are by default responsive doesn't hurt the experience for those who only use them on a full width screen. What about that makes you doubt ?
In the end, whatever you do in Outsystems translates to proven technologies like http requests, javascript, css, .net and sql server. Where do you expect to find hurdles ?
It would be a good next step for your team to make a little POC with the kind of screen you are aiming for, and whatever specific problem you encounter or doubt that comes up in that process, just share them here and people can help see how to best tackle them with Outsystems.
On a side note, business users are also just people, so modern insights on what constitutes a good user experience might also have benefits for your users, maybe a rebuild would be a good trigger to spend some time on rethinking the user interface (budget permitting, of course)
Dorine
Oh no, I don't meant to blame the tool and certainly not the community; I really appreciate all your input and for the right audience I don't doubt the system is great.
See the attached example. I'm not saying it is good design or even a good example, it's just what I had to hand, but as you will see there is a lot going on here (and each of the 5 other tabs has equally as much as the current one). Typically these are very <table> heavy and I know you can do this without tables in a responsive friendly way and each of the fields on here can equally be done within OutSystem, but I have yet to see something as complex as this built in a responsive way (within OutSystems or anything else for that matter)!
Ok,
so why don't you have a go. Just spend a few days on making a POC with this screen as an example.
I don't see anything inherent to Outsystems that would not make this possible.
Surely, with forms that have this much going on, the challenge is in keeping it all organized and maintainable, regardless of the stack you use. And Outsystems offers a lot in the way of for example WebBlocks to organize complex UI.
Your concern is totaly wrong that OS is too much oriented responsive mobile display, If you know the adaptive behaviour is depends on device from which request is coming from it will modify the Interface according to css and JS ( desktop ,mobile or tablet.)
I not see any issues in this behaviour it will provide a rich UI with usability and accessibility .
You might be right, but I have still not seen any example of this... Which was sort of my question?