From the NAV Blogs: Book Review of “NAV 2009 Application Design”; Study Evaluates NAV’s Usefulness and Usability; Keyboard Shortcuts

by Jared Berezin
published June 8, 2010

Book Review: Brummel's "NAV 2009 Application Design": Waldo's Blog is very impressed: "In about 45 pages per chapter, Mark succeeded to pinpoint not only what the core functionality of NAV is all about, but also how it's built. In my opinion: everything a consultant/developer should know! And in that understanding, I'm going to make this book mandatory to read at iFacto, for all our developers and consultants."

On his blog, Mark Brummel recently posted an overview of the book's contents (including a chapter by chapter breakdown).

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About Jared Berezin
Jared Berezin serves as a contributing writer to MSDynamicsWorld.com. With combined interests in technology and science, Jared previously served as a writer for Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, drafting scientific narrative reports on the latest advancements in cancer research. Jared has also served as associate marketing specialist for International Data Corporation (IDC), a market research firm. In this position, he planned and executed strategic marketing initiatives for IDC's software and services research programs, and wrote outbound communications to the press, existing clients, and prospects. Jared also has experience working for several local newspapers in eastern Massachusetts. Jared graduated with honors from Colby College with a BA in English and creative writing.

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Keyboard shortcuts

On June 10th, 2010 grantbrimhall said:

We have been on NAV 2009 RTC for over 18 months. The biggest challenge we have had with keyboard shortcuts is the lost productivity the users experience now that most shortcuts take an extra key stroke (because all the Classic menu buttons are now buried in the RTC "Related Information" button; and because the Classic "functions" button is not buried under "Actions ... Functions"; or F-key replaced with Ctrl+?). This sounds like a petty complaint. But it is the main driver as to why most of our users prefer classic to RTC. They are just faster with Classic.

Here are a couple examples:
Warehouse Clerk looking up bin contents from item card/list:
Classic: Alt+i+b
RTC: Alt+i+i+b

A/P Clerk applying freight charges from purchase order line:
Classic: Alt+l+a (item charge assignment); alt+u+r (get receipt lines); choose your lines; alt+u+i (suggest assignment)
RTC: Alt+a+u+r (get receipt lines); choose your lines; alt+a+u+i

I often see the comment that "old users prefer Classic, so don't show it to new users ... just start them out on RTC". Users who know both prefer Classic. So why not introduce new users to Classic? They can be more productive if they use classic. Of our 70 users, 5 prefer RTC. those are the users that have a very specific repeated task where the role center neatly summarizes their daily work (this is fantastic for them). But, any user that has a broad array of tasks that may need to do research in multiple parts of the system, or whose tasks require multiple windows/pages to complete, prefers Classic becasue the keyboard shortcuts aren't as keyboard intensive.

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