I am working on a Requirement Management software which is truly powerful in features. But now its cluttered with usability issues & I have never seen such complex user xperience like this one. What I found, all features/powers are accessible to every users whoever uses this product.Whether its super Admin or end user. Also found every user base uses some specific features, not all features.
My thought is, can I off/hide secondary user controls which are not that much navigated? Should I provide configurable user controls to different users? Please let me know your thoughts.
Thanks-
Yes you can, and this is exactly what many apps do:
It is common to have a set of easily reached, commonly used gui elements (think the tool palette in Photoshop, or the ribbon in Office) meanwhile less often accessed commands are hidden behind the application menus (File, Edit, View etc) and usually duplicate the commands in the palette / ribbon.
Configurable or not is difficult to give an answer to that is more useful than ‘it depends’.
This is really super-power user territory, and I’d suggest that you do some research with your target users.
Don’t ask them if they configure menus, just ask them to show you how they use a common set of applications (which have configurable menus) and observe whether they have or have not changed anything outside of the default.
The reasons you shouldn’t ask direct are that:
1) People might not know what you’re on about
2) They might just tell you what they think you want to hear (this is very common)
3) People will oftewn say ‘yes’ when you ask them if they want something, whether it’s useful or not (it’s probably to do with loss aversion)