Is it just me, or does anyone else find the excessively long name “Flow Production Tracking” to be a UX anti-pattern ?
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it’s not immediately clear that the menu item is a single menu item or three. Menu items should be a single word ideally, or 2 at most.
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it takes up the same space of around 3 other menus!
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The dropdown menu is now stretched excessively wide.
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I have to read “Flow Production Tracking” on two menu items before I read the word that tells me what the menu item is… sigh.
These may seem like a trivial criticisms, but screen real-estate is a precious resource not to be wasted and ease of reading is critical for a positive user experience. For users with lower screen resolutions, this will cause menus to overspill the available space.
Can Autodesk please settle on a standard acronym for Flow Production Tracking and use that for UI elements? Why not have a FPT or “Flow” main menu, and use a prefix for loader and workfiles menu items : “FPT Loader”, “FPT Workfiles”. In fact, why do we need the prefix at all given the use has just clicked a “FPT” menu in any-case.
I appreciate the rebranding exercise was simply a case of doing a string-replace across the code-base, but it points to a worrying lack of consideration for the end user that no-one thought about how this might impact the UX.
On that note, there seems to be no consistency on how this brand update has been handled; we see the product labelled “Flow Production Tracking” applied across the entire ecosystem, so it would be logical to assume the acronym for this would be FPT, but it appears that the rebranded codebase uses the abbreviation PTR. So which is it?
PTR is the standard code abbreviation for “Pointer”, so any web searches for PTR are likely to be useless. PTR doesn’t include any reference to the word “flow” which is the obvious human-friendly name the product will be given.
Someone’s got to say it…
