Making User Interface smart in eclipse based applications

Question

I am currently developing a desktop application based on eclipse.
Currently the user needs to perform many redundant actions like doing step A in View 1 then doing step B in View 2 then repeat. I am wondering if anybody knows a solution that records/recommends user actions in eclipse based applications.
Maybe based on the history much like the web based solutions.

Any help would be good.

Thanks.

Answer 1

1) Do you want to record the user clicks (actions)?

If so eclipse provides a Location tracker, so you can analyse the use cases from the field. OperationHistoryActionHandler

2) Do you want to have a smarter way the user uses your tool?

Think about using Wizards. in a Wizard you can have a defined number of execution steps. The user does not need to search some button in a view. With a Wizard a specific execution flow is very clean and good to understand.

3) As Jonah mentioned you can use cheatsheets as well.

Answer 2

We once did something similar, where we had a rather big user interface that had heaps and heaps and heaps of different functionalities. Our solution was this:

• We abstracted all actions into commands. They were all implemented in a way that they can be cascaded, undone, redone etc. See for example IUndoableOperation

• The commands had conditions that made it easy to decide if one could combine these commands.

• All commands have an ID and can be easily identified

We then continued to integrate our own run configurations. We added a UI that gave the user the option to cascade multiple commands into one big one. For example, A user wanted to create a new file, apply a template, generate some graphs, export them into a given location etc, the user would create a run configuration adding those commands together.

That way we kept the UI comprehensive but gave the expert user the ability to create their own workflow based on what they do every day.

Our users liked that quite a bit.