Confirmit report refactoring
Round 2, back in Milton Keynes at clients, showing more improvements to their report. To those of you who know the main entry design area of Reportal, you'll recognise the screenshot below. To the left is the old report, with 265 tables. To the right is the new report thus far where I'm refactoring the report pages, tables and charts, which is now 135 tables. Much slimmer, much faster, much better for any future updates.
Why is this so important to the client? There's actually 2 versions of this report and associated survey. Like most customer feedback systems, there's multiple key measurable moments that affect customer-relationship/opinions with you. This client has 2 key moments. Back in 2010, these reports were fabulous. Internet Explorer 9 was out. Remember that? CSS PIE came out, yes, round edges arrived, but we also had to consider IE 7 and 8 back then (ouch), so images played a heavy part. I know I sound old now, but so too are some legacy reports. It's doesn't have to be Confirmit, it's the same with many systems with original builds nearly 10 years old. In the car world, internet 2010 is the same as a 1978 Ferrari (same horse power as todays Ford Focus). Back to the report... in this case, it was the case of "same again, repeat" for the business for every unique end-client query that came in over the 9 years. This really meant "duplicate and tweak". It seemed the right thing to do for the client, I can see that. But to an expert in Confirmit Reportal, like me, it would have made sense to take a stock check on how many unique queries are likely? Can we roll this out so one-change fits all? So it meant I had an awful lot of places to change, update, check and re-check. These was over Christmas and beyond for the first report.
I'm so, so please the client has taken my advice on the this second report to improve it before changing/adding to it. I have introduced a single place to declare all global and custom questions for all clients and their associated recodes/top 2/nets. To those Reportal users who know, this is a simple declaration of variables in a setup section of the code library script area. This means it now takes just 5 minutes to add/remove questions to their report and every page and table using it is immediately updated. The client sat with me asking for a show-and-tell session. They had a large notepad and pen ready to note step-by-step instructions and they reserved over an hour to spend with me for this hand-over task. How happy were they that they didn't need to write in the notepad and they understood how within 5 minutes? Very.
Obviously, my work continues, there's still more gains to be made. I'm still hoping to get this report down to around 60 tables and super fast loading pages. So far previous 10-15 second loading pages... are now under 2 seconds. Been a good few weeks so far. Good progress.