Submit Your Suggestions for Viewpoint for Projects

First of all, top marks to Viewpoint for just forcing a new interface on their entire user base without any interim means to switch back to a 'Classic View' until all bugs or quirks are ironed out, or for there to be a preview period that Power Users could be invited to in advance. No other EDMS provider switches from one interface to another without some form of crossover and live-trial.

Anyway - in the main there is nothing too drastic, but a few things are quickly niggling everybody here:

• Workflow screen - Instead of having a clearly visible dark blue bar at the top displaying the basic information about the document you're looking at (Name, Description, Revision) we now have a plain empty grey bar, even bigger than the blue bar was, and we have to click it to Expand it to show just that basic information which also then takes up a lot more space with lots of empty line padding and extra information such as dates that we don't really need to see dropping the workflow diagram down quite so much. Given that that grey bar already takes up more space than the old blue bar did, can't the basic document information be displayed in it by default, and 'Expand' only have to be used to bring up the dates and History button? This is a must if you're quickly actioning multiple workflows and have them all open in adjacent tabs in your browser - that's not next to impossible to do now

• Containers/Subcontainers - the triangle to expand a container into its subcontainers now pushes the folder icons to the right so they look like they're a subcontainer to the parent container above. This also means all containers at the same level are no longer aligned. Again, the hallmark of something gone through no user-acceptance testing before release

• Most blue heading bars are now the same shade of grey as the background. What is it with web designers these days that want to re-design all professionally-designed UIs into something that only suits a mobile app designed for people who only ever do one or two things, and even then only rarely on more than one thing at a time? We don't need 'infant school' design to 'simply' the experience, we need screen space to be efficiently used so our eyes can do the navigation between each bit.
  
  The least that you could have done was make the +/- 'Expand'/'Collapse' buttons dark blue to contrast with the light grey, i.e. reversing the colour scheme that was there before (silver button on a blue background). And for them to be left-ranging instead of right-ranging as they are now so they're not even that visible, given how far away from the caption text they end up on a typical screen. Again, was this only tested on a mobile in portrait orientation?
  
  Given that the navigation tree has had so much MORE dark blue added to it in this re-design, it's not only nonsensical, but graphically inconsistent (doesn't follow its own House Style) to then REMOVE all the dark blue from the header bars in all the pop-up windows (thankfully the Matrix Transmittal recipients screen hasn't changed yet, but we suspect it's only a matter of time before that changes too).

• Font - yes, I know you want to have a consistent screen font across all your products. Perhaps you could at least have chosen/designed one that is better suited to large-scale information acquisition and analysis? The chosen font may look nice in a cosmetics catalogue or travel magazine, but there are hundreds of much better fonts out there for the purposes of metadata tables, action buttons, other densely-displayed pieces of tabulated information. Preferably one that has a monospace aswell as a proportionally-spaced version so that things like document names/numbers/revisions can be displayed in monospace and therefore not create spacing scatters wherever the number 1, letter I (or l) appears. Also as has already been pointed out, the font you've chosen doesn't seem to have a proper Bold face, so the browser just renders the normal 'Roman' face with an extra pixel's width (well, actually seems like 1/2 pixel with sub-pixel shading). A retrograde step. In some screens, like the long-form document 'Edit' screen, the old 'Standard' font (which itself was never used consistently) is still there, which again is yet another splindly, wide line-spaced font that is difficult for DCs to read or anyone else having to use their eyeballs intensely on Viewpoint for nearly all of their working day - if anyone was so inclined, it would probably be possible to undertake a study to show how much VP's fonts and layouts contribute to eye degeneration amongst heavy users).