Creating new bean -tab-enter-inventory issues

[mark.palmos]

Hi there @derrxb Derrick!
I made this video yesterday showing the process of entering a new bean for using with my roast profiles.

There are several issues, namely

1/ when you type in a vendor/country/whatever, pressing TAB and/or ENTER should mean you want to keep that information. You should not be expected to stop your “power user” flow of using the keyboard, and then reach for the mouse, move it about to click on the same vendor or country you’ve already typed in… That’s such a waste of time and is really annoying to have to mouse about between each and every text entry field. {EDIT} I see I can press the down arrow on the keyboard, select the correct country, then press ENTER… but it would be better if this extra step was not needed.

2/ The description field could be a lot bigger, and also could retain basic formatting, like line breaks, so your info does not get clumped into one huge, hard-to-read paragraph.

3/ A rating field is a MUST for beans… so one can see what rating you gave some bean on a previous occasion. This should also be in the list view so you can easily scan for high scoring beans you’ve had in the past.

4/ The whole “inventory” paradigm is weirdly restrictive and unnecessary. You are asked if you want to enter a bean into your inventory. If you’re like me, not a commercial shop, not using RoastWorld to keep track of the quantities of beans I have in my stock, then I would choose NO, I do not want the bean in my inventory. The problem is, now it is NOT available to be chosen for a new roast! Even worse, I cannot even search for it among “my beans”… it’s gone. So the work around is to say YES to inventory, and tell the system I have 1000000000000000kg of beans… so it just leaves me alone forever… but not ideal.

5/ In the second video, see how a bean that exists in one of my previous roasts cannot be found amongst my beans. With this issue, I know the problem, and the video was made before the bean appeared about 20 mins later… The Roast had an UNTITLED bean, and then I assigned the Volcanes bean to it… but then this Volcanes bean did not show up as one of my beans for about 20 mins… now it does show up. Can this not be made immediate? It’s confusing when you do something and the parts of the software do not speak to each other in real time.

Thanks Derrick! BTW, how’s v4 coming along?
Cheers, Mark.

[derrxb]

Hi @mark.palmos,

Thank you for your post and all the feedback! To answer your notes/questions:

1. You can use the up/down keys to move into the options in the dropdown and pressing Enter should select the highlight option. I think this should be enough to keep the power users moving as they go along. In terms of accessibility, these components are based on React Autocomplete component - Material UI that have accessiblity in mind and follow WAI-ARIA’s recommendations for accessible components.

2. This is a great suggestion. It will require some work on our end to add this though. I added this to our backlog and I will bring it up to the team and get back to you as soon as I have an update.

3. What kind of rating system were you thinking of? Would a simple star (1-5) system work? & is this a value that can be set by every user? I think this can be helpful and so I’ll also add this to the backlog and bring it up with the team.

4. Adding a bean to your inventory just means that you have the bean on hand. You can choose to ignore any inventory tracking and just leave the value at 0. We do require you to explicitly add it to your inventory though as we wouldn’t want all the beans to automatically show up in your bean selector when adding a bean to a roast. There are over 10k bean records on RW and this can lead to complications fast.

5. I will look further into this as it might be a bug. I’ll write back here to let you know.

RT v4 is coming along great! We’re working at a steady pace and I can’t wait for you all to try it out.

Derrick

[mark.palmos]

@derrxb My apologies, for some reason I did not get/see a notification about your response, and saw some other email today which reminded me of some of my pet gripes…

WRT rating/reviewing/commenting… What I find very much missing in workflow is that when I want to use RoastWorld to quickly, easily, effectively go through some of the beans I have tried in the past to see what I would like to purchase next, well, that’s just not available to me… not in any way that is really helpful. I already have sophisticated software for my espresso shot profiles (Decent Espresso) but that is not the place to store comments about beans… this is the place!

On the main page of RoastWorld / Roastime, I would like to be able to click on the Beans section and see:

1/ customisable columns (so I can remove stuff that is completely unnecessary for me, like Vendor / Roasted / In Stock / Roasts ) and to be able to

2/ add columns that ARE useful to me, like Rating / Comment about the bean (I would use a Comment section differently from Description - which for me contains taste notes/farm information/ general blurb about the beans)

3/ columns that can be sorted by ranking (BTW five stars is a bit little, but ok if you can do half stars too… so 3.5 stars would be possible too… saving space and being more accurate at the same time). Sorting by ranking would make it VERY quick and easy to see all the beans that I have been very pleased with, no need to find some bean reviewing 3rd Party software to do this job… most the info is here already, it is a major pity to have to use another software to keep track of beans I would want to try again.

4/ RoasTime’s “Beans Management” button results in a very different beans view than RoastWorld. Because I have copied and pasted lengthy Descriptions from the coffee vendor into the description field, I only see two or three coffees per screen on RoasTime… Sometimes it’s useful to see the full Description up front without having to click on a particular bean to read the full description, but this would be nice as a View Preference - so you can view it as roastWorld displays it, and then toggle to expand fields like Description, Ranking, Comments to see up front and in full as you scroll through your top rated beans!!

roastime:

roastworld:

Again, sorry for the very slow response, I will try to visit the forum rather than rely on email notifications!

Thanks, and I hope 2023 is a great year for you.
Mark.