What Improvements Are Needed in iRise?

• Articles
• iRise
• September 4, 2009

As I become more and more familiar with iRise, I find that I have an ever growing list of improvements that I would like to see. Some items that I come across are those that I accept as the current reality and live with. Other items get me a little frustrated and feel that they really need to address them soon. So here is my short list of things that need improved. Maybe they are coming in the next version, maybe not. Maybe some of you can debunk my suggestions and let me know how to get around them. In any regards, I WOULD LOVE TO HEAR YOUR COMMENTS about what you would like to see changed in future iRise versions.

1) Email Notifications

From the work that I have done with clients, it seems one of the hardest things that I’ve had to spend extra time on is to detail out everything that has been changed or updated within my iRise simulations and email them to clients. I think it would be great if the iRise Definition Center had an email notification process where select clients/participants could be notified or authors could choose when to notify clients based on when pages were updated or when comments within visualizations had been updated or completed. Each client is different in regards to this, but I think it would be a huge advantage for them to be able to know when something needed to be reviewed automatically. 

2) A Review and Approval Process

Going through projects with iRise, I’ve found that no matter how closely to a client’s vision you make your simulation, things are always going to change. There has to be some sort of time limit that you need to establish or an agreement you need to make with the client regarding when a specific functionality is complete. A review and approval workflow would be a great addition again to the iRise Definition Center. That way you could see who is reviewing and approving the functionality and/or pages and use this as a sign off that this is what will be developed. 

3) Drag and Drop

 I bring drag and drop up because it was something that was a major functionality needed in a previous project. I found that although the ability was there in iRise 7, the execution of the functionality was more frustrating than helpful. Moving something one pixel at a time to it’s location was just not something that would work for me. I have been told by iRise support that this is something that will be largely improved in the next version. Let’s hope so…

4) Expanded Sections

 This is a pretty minor one but something I need to bring up. Whenever I have made a view for expanded sections it seems as if no matter if I have the closed view setup as the intial view, if I had gone in an edited the open view it would always show as the open section when executed. This possibly could have been due to having the section set up incorrectly, however it cost me a lot of re-work and re-editing. Thoughts?

5) Design Elements

Don’t get me wrong, I understand that the purpose of iRise is to simulate how an application is supposed to work and not show exactly how something should work. However, as a designer/programmer I came across a few misnomers in regards to how the design looked in the editor and then when executed in the web browser added unwanted padding or my design didn’t look quite right. One example was using a table in a form in a fixed height section that added extra padding and threw off my design. This was combatted by just using a section instead of a section/table combo. Still it caused me some frustration. All I’m really asking is to tighten up your design elements iRise and get some bugs out of here. We all know you are working hard on this, so keep it up.

Again, these are just a few things I’d like to see improved in upcoming versions of iRise. I would love to see and hear your comments on the things that you’ve ran into and would also like improved. If nothing else it helps me for future development and maneuvering around potholes.

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