Papermerge 2.0 development is work in progress. Although application is still not yet ready, you can already see the new user interface in action. In this article I will describe the new user interface improvements and how it will boost your experience with your documents and folders.
Context Menu Instead of Distant Actions Menu Items
One source of complains regarding user experience for previous versions was clumsy actions menu (the one with thunderbolt icon). Basically if you want to rename a document or cut/paste, you need to move away from selected document to actions menu and back. For couple of documents that was fine, but when you need to deal with many documents and folders, that moving away and back starts to be annoying. Same for New Folder button and for Select menu.
Single Clicks Instead of Double Clicks for Opening Documents and Folders
Up until 2.0, in order to open a document or to navigation to a folder – you need to double click the folder or the document – this presents a problem for mobile device users. Also, from development point of view, double clicks were tricky to implement (from browser’s point of view there is no such thing as double click event). Given above two pro arguments for single clicks over double clicks implementation – I decided move away from “double clicks” and use single clicks instead for opening folders/documents. Thus, there will be 2X less clicks in Papermerge 2.0!
Better, Desktop-like Selection
Papermerge 2.0 features a desktop-like selection. This basically means that user can drag a selection rectangle over documents or folders he or she wants to select – this way of selecting is more efficient and pleasant to use than previous method of clicking on each item one by one.
The Very Obvious Download Button
I received couple of emails from Papermerge users asking me if there is a download feature at all and how can they download the documents from Papermerge. The funny part is that obviously there is such a feature and the download button was there since the application inception :). However from user feedback it is obvious that usage of this feature was not intuitive at all. The fix for above mentioned usability issue was to make download button very visible: starting with Papermerge 2.0 if you select one or multiple documents – a big blue download button along other useful information (like all tags associated) will be displayed on the right widget panel.
The UX Improvements Screencast
We love screencasts! In following 7 minutes long screencast you can watch all above mentioned improvements in action. Additional screencasts along with other interesting videos about Papermerge and document management in general you can watch on our YouTube Channel.
Summary
Papermerge is open source document management system designed for scanned documents. It is a perfectly designed to store document records like invoices, letters and bills. Starting with version 2.0, based on great number of feedback from users, Papermerge improves its users interface and user experience in general. Latest version of Papermerge features context menu, desktop like selection or one or multiple documents and very obvious big blue download button.
Papermerge Blog 